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ON THE WITNESS STAND 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 



ESSAYS ON PSYCHOLOGY AND CRIME 



BY 



HUGO MUNSTERBERG 

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. 

MCM1X 



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Copyright, 1908, by The McClure Company 



Published, March, 1908 






Copyright, 1907, 1908, by The S. S. McClure Company 

Copyright, 1908, by The International Magazine Company 

Copyright, 1908, by The Bobbs-Merrill Company 



^ 



TO 

MY COLLABORATORS IN THE 

HARVARD PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY 

EDWIN BISSEL HOLT 

AND 

ROBERT MEARNS YERKES 



CONTENTS 

PAGH 

Introduction 3 

Illusions 13 

The Memory of the Witness 37 

The Detection of Crime 71 

The Traces of Emotions 111 

Untrue Confessions 135 

Suggestions in Court 173 

Hypnotism and Crime 201 

The Prevention of Crime 251 



INTRODUCTION 



INTRODUCTION 

There are about fifty psychological laboratories 
in the United States alone. The average educated 
man has hitherto not noticed this. If he chances 
to hear of such places, he fancies that they serve 
for mental healing, or telepathic mysteries, or 
spiritistic performances. What else can a lab- 
oratory have to do with the mind? Has not the 
soul been for two thousand years the domain of 
the philosopher? What has psychology to do with 
electric batteries and intricate machines? Too 
often have I read such questions in the faces of 
visiting friends who came to the Harvard Psycho- 
logical Laboratory in Emerson Hall and found, 
with surprise, twenty-seven rooms overspun with 
electric wires and filled with chronoscopes and 
kymographs and tachistoscopes and ergographs, 
and a mechanic busy at his work. 

The development of this new science could re- 
main unnoticed because it was such a rapid one, 
surprising in its extent even to those who started 
[3] 



INTRODUCTION 
it. When, as a young student, I went to the Uni- 
versity of Leipzig in the eighties of the last cen- 
tury, the little psychological laboratory there, 
founded by Professor Wundt, was still the only 
one in the world. No Western country college 
would to-day be satisfied with those poor little 
rooms in which the master of the craft made his 
experiments with his few students. But since that 
time the Leipzig workshop has been steadily grow- 
ing, and every year has seen the foundation of 
new institutes by the pupils of Wundt, and later 
by their pupils. The first German laboratory out- 
side of Leipzig was the one which I founded in 
Freiburg just twenty years ago. At about the 
same time Stanley Hall and Cattell brought the 
work from Leipzig over the ocean. To-day there 
exists hardly a university which has not opened a 
workshop for this youngest of the natural sci- 
ences. 

But more brilliant than the external expansion 
has been the inner growth. If the new science 
started in poor quarters, it was still more modest 
at the beginning in its outlook toward the work. 
Experimental psychology did not even start with 
[4] 



INTRODUCTION 

experiments of its own; it rather took its prob- 
lems at first from the neighbouring sciences. 
There was the physiologist or the physician 
who made careful experiments on the functions of 
the eye and the ear and the skin and the muscles, 
and who got in this way somewhat as by-products 
interesting experimental results on seeing and 
hearing and touching and acting ; and yet all these 
by-products evidently had psychological impor- 
tance. Or there was the physicist who had to make 
experiments to find out how far our human senses 
can furnish us an exact knowledge of the outer 
world; and again his results could not but be of 
importance for the psychology of perception. Or 
there was perhaps the astronomer who was bothered 
with his " personal equation," as he was alarmed 
to find that it took different astronomers different 
times to register the passing of a star. The 
astronomers had, therefore, in the interest of their 
calculations, to make experiments to find out with 
what rapidity an impression is noticed and re- 
acted upon. But this again was an experimental 
result which evidently concerned, first of all, the 
student of mental life. 

[5] 



INTRODUCTION 
In this way all kinds of scientists who cared 
little for psychology had gathered the most vari- 
ous psychological results with experimental meth- 
ods, and the psychologists saw that they could 
not afford to ignore such results of natural sci- 
ence. It would not do to go on claiming, for in- 
stance, that thought is quick as lightning when 
the experiments of the astronomers had proved 
that even the simplest mental act is a slow process, 
the time of which can be measured. Experimental 
psychology, therefore, started with an effort to 
repeat on its own account and from its own point 
of view those researches which others had per- 
formed. But it seemed evident that this kind of 
work would never yield more than some little facts 
in the periphery of mental life — borderland facts 
between mind and body. No one dreamed of the 
possibility of carrying such experimental method 
to the higher problems of inner life which seemed 
the exclusive region of the philosophising psychol- 
ogist. But as soon as experimental psychology 
began to work in its own workshops, it was most 
natural to carry the new method persistently to 
new and ever new groups of problems. The tools 
[6] 



INTRODUCTION 
of experiment were now systematically used for 
the study of memory and the connection of ideas, 
then of attention and of imagination, of space 
perception and time sense; slowly they became di- 
rected to the problems of feeling and emotion, of 
impulse and volition, of imitation and reasoning. 
Groups of mental functions which yesterday 
seemed beyond the reach of experimental labora- 
tory methods, to-day appear quite accessible. It 
may be said that there is now hardly a corner 
of mental life into which experimental psychology 
has not thrown its searchlight. 

It may seem strange that this whole wonderful 
development should have gone on in complete de- 
tachment from the problems of practical life. 
Considering that perception and memory, feeling 
and emotion, attention and volition, and so on, are 
the chief factors of our daily life, entering into 
every one of our enjoyments and duties, experi- 
ences and professions, it seems astonishing that 
no path led from the seclusion of the psycho- 
logical workshop to the market-place of the 
world. 

Of course this separation was no disadvantage 
[7] 



INTRODUCTION 
to psychology. It is never a gain when a science 
begins too early to look aside to practical needs. 
The longer a discipline can develop itself under 
the single influence, the search for pure truth, the 
more solid will be its foundations. But now experi- 
mental psychology has reached a stage at which 
it seems natural and sound to give attention also 
to its possible service for the practical needs of 
life. 

This must not be misunderstood. To make 
psychology serviceable cannot mean simply to pick 
up some bits of theoretical psychology and to 
throw them down before the public. Just this has 
sometimes been done by amateurish hands and 
with disastrous results. Undigested psychological 
knowledge has been in the past recklessly forced 
on helpless schoolteachers, and in educational 
meetings the blackboards were at one time filled 
with drawings of ganglion cells and tables of 
reaction-times. No warning against such "yellow 
psychology " can be serious enough. 

If experimental psychology is to enter into its 
period of practical service, it cannot be a question 
of simply using the ready-made results for ends 
[8] 



INTRODUCTION 
which were not in view during the experiments. 
What is needed is to adjust research to the prac- 
tical problems themselves and thus, for instance, 
when education is in question, to start psycholog- 
ical experiments directly from educational prob- 
lems. Applied Psychology will then become an in- 
dependent experimental science which stands re- 
lated to the ordinary experimental psychology as 
engineering to physics. 

The time for such Applied Psychology is surely 
near, and work has been started from most various 
sides. Those fields of practical life which come 
first in question may be said to be education, med- 
icine, art, economics, and law. The educator will 
certainly not resist the suggestion that systematic 
experiments on memory or attention, for instance, 
can be useful for his pedagogical efforts. The 
physician to-day doubts still less that he can be 
aided in the understanding of nervous and mental 
diseases, or in the understanding of pain and of 
mental factors in treatment, by the psychological 
studies of the laboratory. It is also not difficult 
to convince the artist that his instinctive creation 
may well be supplemented by the psychologist's 
[9] 



INTRODUCTION 
study of colour and form, of rhythm and har- 
mony, of suggestion and aesthetic emotion. And 
even the business world begins to understand that 
the effectiveness of economic life depends in a 
thousand forms on factors for which the student 
of psychology is a real specialist. His experiments 
can indicate best how the energies of mill-hands 
can reach the best results, and how advertisements 
ought to be shaped, and what belongs to ideal 
salesmanship. And experience shows that the pol- 
itician who wants to know and to master minds, 
the naturalist who needs to use his mind in the 
service of discovery, the officer who wants to keep 
up discipline, and the minister who wants to 
open minds to inspiration — all are ready to see 
that certain chapters of Applied Psychology are 
sources of help and strength for them. The law- 
yer alone is obdurate. 

The lawyer and the judge and the juryman are 
sure that they do not need the experimental psy- 
chologist. They do not wish to see that in this 
field preeminently applied experimental psychol- 
ogy has made strong strides, led by Binet, Stern, 
Lipmann, Jung, Wertheimer, Gross, Sommer, 
[10] 



INTRODUCTION 
As chaff enburg, and other scholars. They go on 
thinking that their legal instinct and their com- 
mon sense supplies them with all that is needed 
and somewhat more; and if the time is ever to 
come when even the jurist is to show some conces- 
sion to the spirit of modern psychology, public 
opinion will have to exert some pressure. Just in 
the line of the law it therefore seems necessary not 
to rely simply on the technical statements of 
scholarly treatises, but to carry the discussion in 
the most popular form possible before the wider 
tribunal of the general reader. 

With this aim in mind — while working at a 
treatise on " Applied Psychology," which is to 
cover the whole ground with technical detail — I 
have written the following popular sketches, which 
select only a few problems in which psychology 
and law come in contact. They deal essentially 
with the mind of the witness on the witness stand ; 
only the last, on the prevention of crime, takes 
another direction. I have not touched so far the 
psychology of the attorney, of the judge, or of 
the jury — problems which lend themselves to very 
interesting experimental treatment. Even the psy- 

[n] 



INTRODUCTION 
chology of the witness is treated in no way ex- 
haustively; my only purpose is to turn the 
attention of serious men to an absurdly neglected 
field which demands the full 'attention of the 
social community. 



[12] 



ILLUSIONS 



ILLUSIONS 

There had been an automobile accident. Before 
the court one of the witnesses, who had sworn to 
tell " the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," 
declared that the entire road was dry and dusty; 
the other swore that it had rained and the road 
was muddy. The one said that the automobile was 
running very slowly ; the other, that he had never 
seen an automobile rushing more rapidly. The first 
swore that there were only two or three people on 
the village road ; the other, that a large number of 
men, women, and children were passing by. Both 
witnesses were highly respectable gentlemen, 
neither of whom had the slightest interest in 
changing the facts as he remembered them. 

I find among my notes another case, where every- 
thing depended upon the time which had passed 
between a whistle signal from the street and the 
noise of an explosion. It was of the greatest im- 
portance for the court to know whether the time 
was long enough to walk a certain distance for 
[15] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
which at least half a minute was needed. Of two 
unbiassed witnesses, one swore that the time was 
less than ten seconds ; the other, that it was more 
than one minute. Again, there was a case where 
it was essential to find out whether at a certain 
riot the number of guests in the hall was larger 
than the forty who had been invited to attend. 
There were witnesses who insisted that there could 
not have been more than twenty persons present, 
and others who were sure that they saw more than 
one hundred. In a case of poisoning, some mem- 
bers of the family testified that the beverage had a 
disagreeable, sour taste, others, that it was taste- 
less, and others, that it was sweet. In some Bowery 
wrangle, one witness was quite certain that a 
rowdy had taken a beer-mug and kept it in his 
fist while he beat with it the skull of his comrade ; 
while others saw that the two were separated by 
a long table, and that the assailant used the mug 
as a missile, throwing it a distance of six or eight 
feet. In another trial, one witness noticed at the 
sea-shore in moonlight a woman with a child, while 
another witness was not less sure that it was a man 
with a dog. And only recently passengers in a 
[16] 



ILLUSIONS 
train which passed a courtyard were sure, and 
swore, that they had taken in at a glance the dis- 
tinct picture of a man whipping a child ; one swore 
that he had a clean-shaven face, a hat, and was 
standing, while another swore that he had a full 
beard, no hat, and was sitting on a bench. The 
other day two most reliable expert shorthand 
writers felt sure that they had heard the utter- 
ances which they wrote down, and yet the records 
differed widely in important points. 

There is no need of heaping up such illustra- 
tions from actual cases, as everyone who remem- 
bers the last half-dozen murder trials of his city 
knows with what regularity these differences in 
reports of witnesses occur. We may abstract from 
all cases which demand technical knowledge; we 
want to speak here only of direct observations 
and of impressions which do not need any special 
acquaintance with the matter. Wherever real 
professional knowledge is needed, the door is, of 
course, open to every variety of opinion, and one 
famous expert may conscientiously contradict the 
other. No, we speak here only of those impres- 
sions for which every layman is prepared and % 
[17] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
where there can be no difference of opinion. We 
further abstract entirely from all cases of inten- 
tional deception; the witness who lies offers no 
psychological interest for the student of illusions. 
And we exclude all questions of mental disease. 
Thus there remain the unintentional mistakes of 
the sound mind, — and the psychologist must ask 
at once, Are they all of the same order? Is it 
enough to label them simply as illusions of 
memory. 

To make memory responsible is indeed the rou- 
tine way. It is generally taken for granted that 
we all perceive our surroundings uniformly. In 
case there were only twenty men in the hall, no 
one could have seen one hundred. In case the road 
was muddy, no one can have seen it dusty. In case 
the man was shaved, no one can have seen the 
beard. If there is still disagreement, it must have 
crept in through the trickery of memory. The 
perception must be correct; its later reproduc- 
tion may be false. But do we really all perceive 
the same thing, and does it have the same mean- 
ing to us in our immediated absorption of the sur- 
rounding world? Is the court sufficiently aware of 
[18] 



ILLUSIONS 
the great differences between men's perceptions, 
and does the court take sufficient trouble to ex- 
amine the capacities and habits with which the wit- 
ness moves through the world which he believes he 
observes? Of course some kind of a " common- 
sense" consideration has entered, consciously or 
unconsciously, into hundreds of judicial decisions, 
inasmuch as the contradictory evidence has to be 
sifted. The judges have on such occasions more or 
less boldly philosophised or psychologised on 
their own account ; but to consult the psychological 
authorities was out of the question. Legal theorists 
have even proudly boasted of the fact that the 
judges always found their way without psycho- 
logical advice, and yet the records of such cases, 
for instance, in railroad damages, quickly show 
that the psychological inspirations of the bench 
are often directly the opposite of demonstrable 
facts. To be sure, the judge may bolster up the 
case with preceding decisions, but even if the old 
decision was justified, is such an amateur psy- 
chologist prepared to decide whether the mental 
situation is really the same in the new case? Such 
judicial self-help was unavoidable as long as the 
[19] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
psychology of earlier times was hazy and vague, 
but all that has changed with the exact character 
of the new psychology. 

The study of these powers no longer lies out- 
side of the realm of science. The progress of ex- 
perimental psychology makes it an absurd in- 
congruity that the State should devote its fullest 
energy to the clearing up of all the physical hap- 
penings, but should never ask the psychological 
expert to determine the value of that factor which 
becomes most influential — the mind of the witness. 
The demand that the memory of the witness should 
be tested with the methods of modern psychology 
has been raised sometimes, but it seems necessary 
to add that the study of his perceptive judgment 
will have to find its way into the court-room, too. 

Last winter I made, quite by the way, a little 
experiment with the students of my regular psy- 
chology course in Harvard. Several hundred 
young men, mostly between twenty and twenty- 
three, took part. It was a test of a very trivial 
sort. I asked them simply, without any theoretical 
introduction, at the beginning of an ordinary lec- 
ture, to write down careful answers to a number 
[20] 



ILLUSIONS 

of questions referring to that which they would 
see or hear. I urged them to do it as conscien- 
tiously and carefully as possible, and the hundreds 
of answers which I received showed clearly that 
every one had done his best. I shall confine my re- 
port to the first hundred papers taken up at 
random. At first I showed them a large sheet of 
white cardboard on which fifty little black squares 
were pasted in irregular order. I exposed it for 
five seconds, and asked them how many black spots 
were on the sheet. The answers varied between 
twenty-five and two hundred. The answer, over 
one hundred, was more frequent than that of below 
fifty. Only three felt unable to give a definite re- 
ply. Then I showed a cardboard which contained 
only twenty such spots. This time the replies ran 
up to seventy and down to ten. We had here 
highly trained, careful observers, whose attention 
was concentrated on the material, and who had 
full time for quiet scrutiny. Yet in both cases 
there were some who believed that they saw seven 
or eight times more points than some others saw; 
and yet we should be disinclined to believe in the 
sincerity of two witnesses, of whom one felt sure 
[21] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
that he saw two hundred persons in a hall in which 
the other found only twenty-five. 

My next question referred to the perception of 
time. I asked the students to give the number of 
seconds which passed between two loud clicks. I 
separated the two clicks at first by ten seconds, 
and in a further experiment by three seconds. 
When the distance was ten, the answers varied 
between half a second and sixty seconds, a good 
number judging forty-five seconds as the right 
time. The one who called it half a second was a 
Chinese, while all those whose judgments ranged 
from one second to sixty seconds were average 
Americans. When the objective time was three 
seconds, the answers varied between half a second 
and fifteen seconds. I emphasise that these large 
fluctuations showed themselves in spite of the fact 
that the students knew beforehand that they were 
to estimate the time interval. The variations would 
probably have been still greater if the question 
had been put to them after hearing the sound 
without previous information; and yet a district 
attorney hopes for a reliable reply when he in- 
quires of a witness, perhaps of a cabman, how 
[22] 



ILLUSIONS 
much time passed by between a cry and the shoot- 
ing in the cab. 

In my third experiment I wanted to find out 
how rapidity is estimated. I had on the platform 
a large clock with a white dial over which one 
black pointer moved once around in five seconds. 
The end of the black pointer, which had the form 
of an arrow, moved over the edge of the dial with 
a velocity of ten centimeters in one second; that 
is, in one second the arrow moved through a space 
of about a finger's length. Now, I made this clock 
go for a whole minute, and asked the observers to 
watch carefully the rapidity of the arrow, and to 
describe, either in figures or by comparisons with 
moving objects, the speed with which that arrow 
moved along. Most men preferred comparisons 
with other objects. The list begins as follows: man 
walking slowly; accommodation-train; bicycle- 
rider; funeral cortege in a city street; trotting 
dog; faster than trot of man; electric car; ex- 
press train ; goldfish in water ; fastest automobile 
speed ; very slowly, like a snail ; lively spider ; and 
so on. Would it seem possible that university stu- 
dents, trained in observation, could watch a move- 
[23] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
ment constantly through a whole minute, and yet 
disagree whether it moved as slowly as a snail or 
as rapidly as an express-train. And yet it is evi- 
dent that the form of the experiment excluded 
every possible mistake of memory and excluded 
every suggestive influence. The observation was 
made deliberately and without haste. 

Those who judged in figures showed not less 
variation. The list begins: one revolution in two 
seconds ; one revolution in forty-five seconds ; three 
inches a second; twelve feet a second; thirty sec- 
onds to the hundred yards; seven miles an hour; 
fifteen miles an hour ; forty miles an hour ; and so 
on. In reality the arrow would have moved in an 
hour about a third of a mile. Not a few of the 
judgments, therefore, multiplied the speed by more 
than one hundred. 

In my next test I asked the class to describe 
the sound they would hear and to say from what 
source it came. The sound which I produced was 
the tone of a large tuning-fork, which I struck 
with a little hammer below the desk, invisibly to 
the students. Among the hundred students whose 
papers I examined for this record were exactly 
[24] 



ILLUSIONS 
two who recognised it as a tuning-fork tone. All 
the other judgments took it for a bell, or an 
organ-pipe, or a muffled gong, or a brazen instru- 
ment, or a horn, or a 'cello string, or a violin, and 
so on. Or they compared it with as different noises 
as the growl of a lion, a steam whistle, a fog-horn, 
a fly-wheel, a human song, and what not. The de- 
scription, on the other hand, called it: soft, mel- 
low, humming, deep, dull, solemn, resonant, pene- 
trating, full, rumbling, clear, low ; but then again, 
rough, sharp, whistling, and so on. Again I insist 
that every one knew beforehand that he was to 
observe the tone, which I announced by a signal. 
How much more would the judgments have differed 
if the tone had come in unexpectedly? — a tone 
which even now appeared so soft to some and so 
rough to others — like a bell to one and like a 
whistle to his neighbour. 

I turn to a few experiments in which I showed 
several sheets of white cardboard, of which each 
contained a variety of dark and light ink-spots in 
a somewhat fantastic arrangement. Each of these 
cards was shown for two seconds, and it was sug- 
gested that these rough ink-drawings represented 
[25] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
something in the outer world. Immediately after 
seeing one, the students were to write down what 
the drawing represented. In some cases the sub- 
jects remained sceptical and declared that those 
spots did not represent anything, but were merely 
blots of ink. In the larger number the suggestion 
was effective, and a definite object was recognised. 
The list of answers for one picture begins : soldiers 
in a valley ; grapes ; a palace ; river-bank ; Jap- 
anese landscape ; foliage ; rabbit ; woodland scene ; 
town with towers; rising storm; shore of lake; 
garden; flags; men in landscape; hair in curling- 
papers ; china plate ; war picture ; country square ; 
lake in a jungle; trees with stone wall; clouds; 
harvest scene; elephant; map; lake with castle in 
background ; trees ; and so on. The list of votes 
for the next picture, which had finer details, 
started with : spider ; landscape ; turtle ; butterfly ; 
woman's head ; bunch of war-flags ; ballet-dancers ; 
crowd of people ; cactus plant ; skunk going down 
a log; centipede; boat on pond; crow's nest; 
beetle; flower; island; and so forth. There are 
hardly any repetitions, with the exception that the 
vague term " landscape " occurs often. Of course, 
[26] 



ILLUSIONS 
we know, since the days of Hamlet and Polonius, 
that a cloud can look like a camel and like a whale. 
And yet such an abundance of variations was 
hardly to be foreseen. 

My next question did not refer to immediate 
perception, but to a memory image so vividly at 
every one's disposal that I assumed a right to sub- 
stitute it directly for a perception. I asked my 
men to compare the apparent size of the full moon 
to that of some object held in the hand at arm's 
length. I explained the question carefully, and 
said that they were to describe an object just large 
enough, when seen at arm's length, to cover the 
whole full moon. My list of answers begins as fol- 
lows: quarter of a dollar; fair-sized canteloupe; 
at the horizon, large dinner plate, overhead, des- 
sert-plate ; my watch ; six inches in diameter ; silver 
dollar ; hundred times as large as my watch ; man's 
head; fifty-cent piece; nine inches in diameter; 
grape-fruit; carriage-wheel; butter-plate; or- 
ange ; ten feet ; two inches ; one-cent piece ; school- 
room clock; a pea; soup-plate; fountain-pen; 
lemon-pie ; palm of the hand ; three feet in diam- 
eter: enough to show, again, the overwhelming 
[27] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
manifoldness of the impressions received. To the 
surprise of my readers, perhaps, it may be added 
at once that the only man who was right was the 
one who compared it to a pea. It is most probable 
that the results would not have been different if I 
had asked the question on a moonlight night with 
the full moon overhead. The substitution of the 
memory image for the immediate perception can 
hardly have impaired the correctness of the judg- 
ments. If in any court the size of a distant object 
were to be given by witnesses, and one man de- 
clared it appeared as large as a pea at arm's dis- 
tance, and the second as large as a lemon-pie and 
the third ten feet in diameter, it would hardly be 
fair to form an objective judgment till the psy- 
chologist had found out which mental factors 
were entering into that estimate. 

There were many more experiments in the list ; 
but as I want to avoid all technicality, I refer to 
only two more, which are somewhat related. First, 
I showed to the men some pairs of coloured paper 
squares, and they had ample time to write down 
which of the two appeared to them darker. At first 
it was a red and a blue ; then a blue and a green ; 
[28] 



ILLUSIONS 
and finally a blue and a grey. My interest was en- 
gaged entirely with the last pair. The grey was 
objectively far lighter than the dark blue, and any 
one with an unbiassed mind who looked at those 
two squares of paper could have not the slightest 
doubt that the blue was darker. Yet about one- 
fifth of the men wrote that the grey was darker. 
Now, let us keep this in mind in looking over 
the last experiment, which I want to report. I 
stood on the platform behind a low desk and 
begged the men to watch and to describe every- 
thing which I was going to do from one given 
signal to another. As soon as the signal was given, 
I lifted with my right hand a little revolving wheel 
with a colour-disk and made it run and change its 
color, and all the time, while I kept the little in- 
strument at the height of my head, I turned my 
eyes eagerly toward it. While this was going on, 
up to the closing signal, I took with my left hand, 
at first, a pencil from my vest-pocket and wrote 
something at the desk ; then I took my watch out 
and laid it on the table; then I took a silver cig- 
arette-box from my pocket, opened it, took a 
cigarette out of it, closed it with a loud click, and 
[29] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

returned it to my pocket ; and then came the end- 
ing signal. The results showed that eighteen of 
the hundred had not noticed anything of all that 
I was doing with my left hand. Pencil and watch 
and cigarettes had simply not existed for them. 
The mere fact that I myself seemed to give all my 
attention to the colour-wheel had evidently inhib- 
ited in them the impressions of the other side. Yet 
I had made my movements of the left arm so osten- 
tatiously, and I had beforehand so earnestly in- 
sisted that they ought to watch every single move- 
ment, that I hardly expected to make any one 
overlook the larger part of my actions. It showed 
that the medium, famous for her slate tricks, was 
right when she asserted that as soon as she suc- 
ceeded in turning the attention of her client to 
the slate in her hand, he would not notice if an 
elephant should pass behind her through the room. 
But the chief interest belongs to the surprising 
fact that of those eighteen men, fourteen were the 
same who, in the foregoing experiment, judged 
the light grey to be darker than the dark blue. 
That coincidence was, of course, not chance. In 
the case of the darkness experiment the mere idea 
[30] 



ILLUSIONS 
of greyness gave to their suggestible minds the 
belief that the colourless grey must be darker than 
any colour. They evidently did not judge at all 
from the optical impression, but entirely from 
their conception of grey as darkness. The coinci- 
dence, therefore, proved clearly how very quickly 
a little experiment such as this with a piece of blue 
and grey paper, which can be performed in a few 
seconds, can pick out for us those minds which 
are probably unfit to report, whether an action 
has been performed in their presence or not. 
Whatever they expect to see they do see; and if 
the attention is turned in one direction, they are 
blind and deaf and idiotic in the other. 

Enough of my class-room experiments. Might 
they not indeed work as a warning against the 
blind confidence in the observations of the average 
normal man, and might they not reinforce the de- 
mand for a more careful study of the individual 
differences between those on the witness stand? Of 
course, such study would be one-sided if the psy- 
chologist were only to emphasise the varieties of 
men and the differences by which one man's judg- 
ment and observation may be counted on to throw 
[31] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

out an opposite report from that of another man. 
No, the psychologist in the court-room should cer- 
tainly give not less attention to the analysis of 
those illusions which are common to all men and 
of which as yet common sense knows too little. The 
jurymen and the judge do not discriminate, 
whether the witness tells that he saw in late twi- 
light a woman in a red gown or one in a blue gown. 
They are not expected to know that such a faint 
light would still allow the blue colour sensation to 
come in, while the red colour sensation would have 
disappeared. 

They are not obliged to know what directions 
of sound are mixed up by all of us and what are 
discriminated; they do not know, perhaps, that 
we can never be in doubt whether we heard on the 
country road a cry from the right or from the 
left, but we may be utterly unable to say whether 
we heard it from in front or from behind. They 
have no reason to know that the victim of a crime 
may have been utterly unable to perceive that he 
was stabbed with a pointed dagger; he may have 
felt it like a dull blow. We hear the witnesses talk- 
ing about the taste of poisoned liquids, and there 
[32] 



ILLUSIONS 

is probably no one in the jury-box who knows 
enough of physiological psychology to be aware 
that the same substance may taste quite differently 
on different parts of the tongue. We may hear 
quarrelling parties in a civil suit testify as to the 
size and length and form of a field as it appeared 
to them, and yet there is no one to remind the 
court that the same distance must appear quite 
differently under a hundred different conditions. 
The judge listens, perhaps, to a description of 
things which the witness has secretly seen through 
the keyhole of the door; he does not understand 
why all the judgments as to the size of objects 
and their place are probably erroneous under such 
circumstances. The witness may be sure of having 
felt something wet, and yet he may have felt only 
some smooth, cold metal. In short, every chapter 
and sub-chapter of sense psychology may help to 
clear up the chaos and the confusion which prevail 
in the observation of witnesses. 

But, as we have insisted, it is never a question 
of pure sense perception. Associations, judg- 
ments, suggestions, penetrate into every one of 
our observations. We know from the drawings of 
[38] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
children how they believe that they see all that they 
know really exists; and so do we ourselves believe 
that we perceive at least all that we expect. I re- 
member some experiments in my laboratory where 
I showed printed words with an instantaneous il- 
lumination. Whenever I spoke a sentence before- 
hand, I was able to influence the seeing of the 
word. The printed word was courage: I said 
something about the university life, and the sub- 
ject read the word afc college. The printed word 
was Philistines: I, apparently without intention, 
had said something about colonial policy, and 
my subject read Philippines. In this way, of 
course, the fraudulent advertisement makes us 
overlook some essential element which may change 
the meaning of the offer entirely. Experimental 
psychology has at last cleared the ground, and to 
ignore this whole science and to be satisfied with 
the primitive psychology of common sense seems 
really out of order when crime and punishment 
are in question and the analysis of the mind of the 
witness might change the whole aspect of the case. 
It is enough if we have to suffer from these 
mental varieties in our daily life; at least the 
[34] 



ILLUSIONS 
court-room ought to come nearer to the truth, and 
ought to show the way. The other organs of so- 
ciety may then slowly follow. It may be that, ulti- 
mately, even the newspapers may learn then from 
the legal practice, and may take care that their 
witnesses be examined, too, as to their capacity of 
observation. Those experiments described from 
my class-room recommend at least mildness of 
judgment when we compare the newspaper reports 
with each other. Since I saw that my own students 
do not know whether a point moves with the slow- 
ness of a snail or with the rapidity of an express- 
train ; whether a time interval is half a second or a 
whole minute ; whether there are twenty-five points 
or two hundred; whether a tone comes from a 
whistle, a gong, or a violin; whether the moon is 
small as a pea or large as a man, — I am not sur- 
prised any more when I read the reports of the 
papers. 

I had occasion recently to make an address on 
peace in New York before a large gathering, to 
which there was an unexpected and somewhat 
spirited reply. The reporters sat immediately in 
front of the platform. One man wrote that the 
[35] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
audience was so surprised by my speech that it 
received it in complete silence ; another wrote that 
I was constantly interrupted by loud applause, 
and that at the end of my address the applause 
continued for minutes. The one wrote that during 
my opponent's speech I was constantly smiling; 
the other noticed that my face remained grave and 
without a smile. The one said that I grew purple- 
red from excitement; and the other found that 
I grew white like chalk. The one told us that my 
critic, while speaking, walked up and down the 
large stage; and the other, that he stood all the 
while at my side and patted me in a fatherly way 
on the shoulder. And Mr. Dooley finally heard 
that before I made my speech on peace I was in- 
troduced as the Professor from the Harvard War 
School — but it may be that Mr. Dooley was not 
himself present. 



[86] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 

Last summer I had to face a jury as witness in a 
trial. While I was with my family at the seashore 
my city house had been burglarised and I was 
called upon to give an account of my findings 
against the culprit whom they had caught with a 
part of the booty. I reported under oath that the 
burglars had entered through a cellar window, 
and then described what rooms they had visited. 
To prove, in answer to a direct question, that they 
had been there at night, I told that I had found 
drops of candle wax on the second floor. To show 
that they intended to return, I reported that they 
had left a large mantel clock, packed in wrapping 
paper, on the dining-room table. Finally, as to 
the amount of clothes which they had taken, I 
asserted that the burglars did not get more than 
a specified list which I had given the police. 

Only a few days later I found that every one 
of these statements was wrong. They had not en- 
tered through the window, but had broken the 
[89] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
lock of the cellar door ; the clock was not packed 
by them in wrapping paper, but in a tablecloth; 
the candle droppings were not on the second floor, 
but in the attic; the list of lost garments was to 
be increased by seven more pieces; and while my 
story under oath spoke always of two burglars, 
I do not know that there was more than one. How 
did all those mistakes occur? I have no right to 
excuse myself on the plea of a bad memory. Dur- 
ing the last eighteen years I have delivered about 
three thousand university lectures. For those 
three thousand coherent addresses I had not once 
a single written or printed line or any notes what- 
ever on the platform ; and yet there has never been 
a moment when I have had to stop for a name or 
for the connection of the thought. My memory 
serves me therefore rather generously. I stood 
there, also, without prejudice against the defend- 
ant. Inasmuch as he expects to spend the next 
twelve years at a place of residence where he will 
have little chance to read my writings, I may con- 
fess frankly that I liked the man. I was thus un- 
der the most favourable conditions for speaking 
the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and, as 
[40] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
there is probably no need for the assurance of my 
best intentions, I felt myself somewhat alarmed in 
seeing how many illusions had come in. 

Of course, I had not made any careful examina- 
tion of the house. I had rushed in from the sea- 
shore as soon as the police notified me, in the fear 
that valuable contents of the house might have 
been destroyed or plundered. When I saw that 
they had treated me mildly, inasmuch as they had 
started in the wine cellar and had forgotten under 
its genial influence, on the whole, what they had 
come for, I had taken only a superficial survey. 
That a clock was lying on the table, packed ready 
to be taken away, had impressed itself clearly on 
my memory; but that it was packed in a table- 
cloth had made evidently too slight an impression 
on my consciousness. My imagination gradually 
substituted the more usual method of packing with 
wrapping paper, and I was ready to take an oath 
on it until I went back later, at the end of the 
summer vacation. In the same way I got a vivid 
image of the candle droppings on the floor, but as, 
at the moment of the perception, no interest was 
attached to the peculiar place where I saw them, 
[41] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
I slowly substituted in my memory the second floor 
for the attic, knowing surely from strewn papers 
and other disorder that they had ransacked both 
places. As to the clothes, I had simply forgotten 
that I had put several suits in a remote wardrobe ; 
only later did I find it empty. My other two 
blunders clearly arose under the influence of sug- 
gestion. The police and every one about the house 
had always taken as a matter of course that the 
entrance was made by a cellar window, as it would 
have been much more difficult to use the locked 
doors. I had thus never examined the other hy- 
pothesis, and yet it was found later that they did 
succeed in removing the lock of a door. And 
finally, my whole story under oath referred to two 
burglars, without any doubt at the moment. The 
fact is, they had caught the gentleman in question 
when he, a few days later, plundered another 
house. He then shot a policeman, but was ar- 
rested, and in his room they found a jacket with 
my name written in it by the tailor. That alone 
gave a hint that my house also had been entered; 
but from the first moment he insisted that there 
had been two in this burglary and that the other 
[42] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
man had the remainder of the booty. The other 
has not been found, and he probably still wears my 
badges; but I never heard any doubt as to his 
existence, and thus, in mere imitation, I never 
doubted that there was a companion, in spite of 
the fact that every part of the performance might 
just as well have been carried out by one man 
alone; and, after all, it is not impossible that he 
should lie as well as shoot and steal. 

In this way, in spite of my best intentions, in 
spite of good memory and calm mood, a whole 
series of confusions, of illusions, of forgetting, 
of wrong conclusions, and of yielding to sug- 
gestions were mingled with what I had to report 
under oath, and my only consolation is the fact 
that in a thousand courts at a thousand places all 
over the world, witnesses every day affirm by oath 
in exactly the same way much worse mixtures of 
truth and untruth, combinations of memory and 
of illusion, of knowledge and of suggestion, of 
experience and wrong conclusions. Not one of my 
mistakes was of the slightest consequence. But is 
it probable that this is always so? Is it not more 
natural to suppose that every day errors creep 
[43] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
into the work of justice through wrong evidence 
which has the outer marks of truth and trust- 
worthiness? Of course, judge and jury and, later, 
the newspaper reader try their best to weigh the 
evidence. Not every sworn statement is accepted 
as absolute reality. Contradictions between wit- 
nesses are too familiar. But the instinctive doubt 
refers primarily to veracity. The public in the 
main suspects that the witness lies, while taking 
for granted that if he is normal and conscious of 
responsibility he may forget a thing, but it would 
not believe that he could remember the wrong 
thing. The confidence in the reliability of memory 
is so general that the suspicion of memory illu- 
sions evidently plays a small role in the mind of 
the juryman, and even the cross-examining lawyer 
is mostly dominated by the idea that a false state- 
ment is the product of intentional falsehood. 

All this is a popular illusion against which mod- 
ern psychology must seriously protest. Justice 
would less often miscarry if all who are to weigh 
evidence were more conscious of the treachery of 
human memory. Yes, it can be said that, while the 
court makes the fullest use of all the modern sci- 
[44 ] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 

entific methods when, for instance, a drop of dried 
blood is to be examined in a murder case, the same 
court is completely satisfied with the most unsci- 
entific and haphazard methods of common preju- 
dice and ignorance when a mental product, espe- 
cially the memory report of a witness, is to be ex- 
amined. No juryman would be expected to follow 
his general impressions in the question as to 
whether the blood on the murderer's shirt is human 
or animal. But he is expected to make up his mind 
as to whether the memory ideas of a witness are 
objective reproductions of earlier experience or are 
mixed up with associations and suggestions. The 
court proceeds as if the physiological chemistry 
of blood examination had made wonderful prog- 
ress, while experimental psychology, with its ef- 
forts to analyse the mental faculties, still stood 
where it stood two thousand years ago. 

The fact is that experimental psychology has 
not only in general experienced a wonderful 
progress during the last decades, but has also 
given in recent years an unusual amount of atten- 
tion to just those problems which are involved on 
the witness stand. It is perhaps no exaggeration 
[45] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
to say that a new special science has even grown 
up which deals exclusively with the reliability of 
memory. It started in Germany and has had there 
for some years even a magazine of its own. But 
many investigations in France and the United 
States tended from the start in the same direction, 
and the work spread rapidly over the psycholog- 
ical laboratories of the world. Rich material has 
been gathered, and yet practical jurisprudence is, 
on the whole, still unaware of it ; and while the 
alienist is always a welcome guest in the court 
room, the psychologist is still a stranger there. 
The Court would rather listen for whole days to 
the " science " of the handwriting experts than 
allow a witness to be examined with regard to his 
memory and his power of perception, his attention 
and his associations, his volition and his suggesti- 
bility, with methods which are in accord with the 
exact work of experimental psychology. It is so 
much easier everywhere to be satisfied with sharp 
demarcation lines and to listen only to a yes or no ; 
the man is sane or insane, and if he is sane, he 
speaks the truth or he lies. The psychologist 
would upset this satisfaction completely. 
[46] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 

The administration of an oath is partly respon- 
sible for the wrong valuation of the evidence. Its 
seriousness and solemnity suggest that the condi- 
tions for complete truth are given if the witness is 
ready not to lie. We are too easily inclined to con- 
fuse the idea of truth in a subjective and in an 
objective sense. A German proverb says, " Chil- 
dren and fools speak the truth," and with it goes 
the old " In vino Veritas." Of course, no one can 
suppose that children, fools, and tipsy men have 
a deeper insight into true relations than the sober 
and grown-up remainder of mankind. What is 
meant is only that all the motives are lacking 
which, in our social turmoil, may lead others to the 
intentional hiding of the truth. Children do not 
suppress the truth, because they are naive; the 
fools do not suppress it, because they are reckless ; 
and the mind under the influence of wine does not 
suppress it, because the suppressing mechanism 
of inhibition is temporarily paralysed by alcohol. 
The subjective truth may thus be secured, and yet 
the idle talk of the drunkard and the child and the 
fool may be objectively untrue from beginning to 
end. It is in this way only that the oath by its re- 
[47] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
ligious background and by its connection with 
threatened punishment can work for truth. It can 
and will remove to a high degree the intention to 
hide the truth, but it may be an open question to 
what degree it can increase the objective truthful- 
ness. 

Of course, everyone knows that the oath helps 
in at least one more direction in curbing misstate- 
ments. It not only suppresses the intentional lie, 
but it focusses the attention on the details of the 
statement. It excludes the careless, hasty, chance 
recollection, and stirs the deliberate attention of 
the witness. He feels the duty of putting his best 
will into the effort to reproduce the whole truth 
and nothing but the truth. No psychologist will 
deny this effect. He will ask only whether the in- 
tention alone is sufficient for success and whether 
the memory is really improved in every respect by 
increased attention. We are not always sure that 
our functions run best when we concentrate our 
effort on them and turn the full light of attention 
on the details. We may speak fluently, but the 
moment we begin to give attention to the special 
movements of our lips and of our tongue in speak- 
[48] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
ing and make a special effort to produce the move- 
ments correctly, we are badly hampered. Is it so 
sure that our memory works faultlessly simply 
because we earnestly want it to behave well? We 
may try hard to think of a name and it will not 
appear in consciousness; and when we have 
thought of somethng else for a long time, the de- 
sired name suddenly slips into our mind. May it 
not be in a similar way that the effort for correct 
recollection under oath may prove powerless to a 
degree which public opinion underestimates? And 
no subjective feeling of certainty can be an ob- 
jective criterion for the desired truth. 

A few years ago a painful scene occurred in 
Berlin, in the University Seminary of Professor 
von Liszt, the famous criminologist. The Pro- 
fessor had spoken about a book. One of the older 
students suddenly shouts, " I wanted to throw 
light on the matter from the standpoint of Chris- 
tian morality ! " Another student throws in, " I 
cannot stand that ! " The first starts up, ex- 
claiming, " You have insulted me ! " The second 
clenches his fist and cries, " If you say another 

word " The first draws a revolver. The sec- 

[49] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

ond rushes madly upon him. The Professor steps 
between them and, as he grasps the man's arm, the 
revolver goes off. General uproar. In that mo- 
ment Professor Liszt secures order and asks a part 
of the students to write an exact account of all 
that has happened. The whole had been a comedy? 
carefully planned and rehearsed by the three 
actors for the purpose of studying the exactitude 
of observation and recollection. Those who did 
not write the report at once were, part of them, 
asked to write it the next day or a week later ; and 
others had to depose their observations under 
cross-examination. The whole objective perform- 
ance was cut up into fourteen little parts which 
referred partly to actions, partly to words. As 
mistakes there were counted the omissions, the 
wrong additions and the alterations. The smallest 
number of mistakes gave twenty-six per cent, of 
erroneous statements; the largest was eighty per 
cent. The reports with reference to the second 
half of the performance, which was more strongly 
emotional, gave an average of fifteen per cent, 
more mistakes than those of the first half. Words 
were put into the mouths of men who had been 
[50] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
silent spectators during the whole short episode; 
actions were attributed to the chief participants 
of which not the slightest trace existed ; and essen- 
tial parts of the tragi-comedy were completely 
eliminated from the memory of a number of wit- 
nesses. 

This dramatic psychological experiment of six 
years ago opened up a long series of similar tests 
in a variety of places, with a steady effort to im- 
prove the conditions. The most essential condition 
remained, of course, always the complete naivete 
of the witnesses, as the slightest suspicion on 
their part would destroy the value of the experi- 
ment. It seems desirable even that the writing of 
the protocol should still be done in a state of be- 
lief. There was, for instance, two years ago in 
Gottingen a meeting of a scientific association, 
made up of jurists, psychologists, and physicians, 
all, therefore, men well trained in careful observa- 
tion. Somewhere in the same street there was that 
evening a public festivity of the carnival. Sud- 
denly, in the midst of the scholarly meeting, the 
doors open, a clown in highly coloured costume 
rushes in in mad excitement, and a negro with a 
[SI] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
revolver in hand follows him. In the middle of the 
hall first the one, then the other, shouts wild 
phrases ; then the one falls to the ground, the other 
jumps on him; then a shot, and suddenly both 
are out of the room. The whole affair took less 
than twenty seconds. All were completely taken 
by surprise, and no one, with the exception of the 
President, had the slighest idea that every word 
and action had been rehearsed beforehand, or 
that photographs had been taken of the scene. 
It seemed most natural that the President should 
beg the members to write down individually an 
exact report, inasmuch as he felt sure that the 
matter would come before the courts. Of the 
forty reports handed in, there was only one whose 
omissions were calculated as amounting to less 
than twenty per cent, of the characteristic acts; 
fourteen had twenty to forty per cent, of the 
facts omitted; twelve omitted forty to fifty per 
cent., and thirteen still more than fifty per cent. 
But besides the omissions there were only six 
among the forty which did not contain positively 
wrong statements; in twenty-four papers up to 
ten per cent, of the statements were free inven- 
[52] 






THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 

tions, and in ten answers — that is, in one-fourth 
of the papers, — more than ten per cent, of 
the statements were absolutely false, in spite of 
the fact that they all came from scientifically 
trained observers. Only four persons, for in- 
stance, among forty noticed that the negro had 
nothing on his head ; the others gave him a derby, 
or a high hat, and so on. In addition to this, a 
red suit, a brown one, a striped one, a coffee- 
coloured jacket, shirt sleeves, and similar cos- 
tumes were invented for him. He wore in reality 
white trousers and a black jacket with a large red 
necktie. The scientific commission which reported 
the details of the inquiry came to the general 
statement that the majority of the observers omit- 
ted or falsified about half of the processes which 
occurred completely in their field of vision. As was 
to be expected, the judgment as to the time dura- 
tion of the act varied between a few seconds and 
several minutes. 

It is not necessary to tell more of these dra- 
matic experiments, which have recently become 
the fashion and almost a sport, and which will still 
have to be continued with a great variety of con- 
[58] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
ditions if the psychological laws involved are 
really to be cleared up. There are many points, 
for instance, in which the results seem still contra- 
dictory. In some cases it was shown that the mis- 
takes made after a week were hardly more frequent 
than those made after a day. Other experiments 
seemed to indicate that the number of mistakes 
steadily increases with the length of time which 
has elapsed. Again, some experiments suggest 
that the memory of the two sexes is not essentially 
different, while the majority of the tests seems to 
speak for very considerable difference. Experi- 
ments with school children, especially, seem to 
show that the girls have a better memory than the 
boys as far as omissions are concerned ; they for- 
get less. But they have a worse memory than the 
boys as far as correctness is concerned ; they unin- 
tentionally falsify more. 

We may consider here still another point which 
is more directly connected with our purpose. A 
well-known psychologist showed three pictures, 
rich in detail, but well adapted to the interest of 
children, to a large number of boys and girls. 
They looked at each picture for fifteen seconds 
[54] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
and then wrote a full report of everything they 
could remember. After that they were asked to 
underline those parts of their reports of which 
they felt so absolutely certain that they would be 
ready to take an oath before court on the under- 
lined words. The young people put forth their 
best efforts, and yet the results showed that there 
were almost as many mistakes in the underlined 
sentences as in the rest. This experiment has been 
often repeated and the results make clear that 
this happens in a smaller and yet still surprising 
degree in the case of adults also. The grown-up 
students of my laboratory commit this kind of 
perjury all the time. 

Subtler experiments which were carried on in 
my laboratory for a long time showed that this 
subjective feeling of certainty can not only ob- 
tain in different degrees, but has, with different 
individuals, quite different mental structure and 
meaning. We found that there were, above all, 
two distinct classes. For one of those types cer- 
tainty in the recollection of an experience would 
rest very largely upon the vividness of the image. 
For the other type it would depend upon the 
[55] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
congruity of an image with other previously ac- 
cepted images ; that is, on the absence of conflicts, 
when the experience judged about is imagined as 
part of a wide setting of past experiences. But 
the most surprising result of those studies was 
perhaps that the feeling of certainty stands in no 
definite relation to the attention with which the 
objects are observed. If we turn our attention 
with strongest effort to certain parts of a complex 
impression, we may yet feel in our recollection 
more certain about those parts of which we 
hardly took notice than about those to which we 
devoted our attention. The correlations between 
attention, recollection, and feeling of certainty 
become the more complex the more we carefully 
study them. Not only the self-made psychology of 
the average juryman, but also the scanty psy- 
chological statements which judge and attorney 
find in the large compendiums on Evidence fall to 
pieces if a careful examination approaches the 
mental facts. 

The sources of error begin, of course, before 
the recollection sets in. The observation itself 
may be defective and illusory ; wrong associations 
[56] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
may make it imperfect; judgments may misinter- 
pret the experience ; and suggestive influences may 
falsify the data of the senses. Everyone knows 
the almost unlimited individual differences in the 
power of correct observation and judgment. 
Everyone knows that there are persons who, under 
favourable conditions, see what they are expected 
to see. The prestidigitateurs, the fakirs, the spirit- 
ualists could not play their tricks if they could 
not rely on associations and suggestions, and it 
would not be so difficult to read proofs if we did 
not usually see the letters which we expect. But 
we can abstract here from the distortions which 
enter into the perception itself; we have discussed 
them before. The mistakes of recollection alone 
are now the object of our inquiry and we may 
throw light on them from still another side. 

Many of us remember minutes in which we 
passed through an experience with a distinct 
jand almost uncanny feeling of having passed 
through it once before. The words which we 
hear, the actions which we see, we remember ex- 
actly that we experienced them a long time ago. 
The case is rare with men, but with women ex- 
[57] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

tremely frequent, and there are few women who 
do not know the state. An idea is there distinctly 
coupled with the feeling of remembrance and 
recognition, and yet it is only an associated sensa- 
tion, resulting from fatigue or excitement, and 
without the slightest objective basis in the past. 
The psychologist feels no difficulty in explaining 
it, but it ought to stand as a great warning signal 
before the minds of those who believe that the 
feeling of certainty in recollection secures objec- 
tive truth. There is no new principle involved, of 
course, when the ideas which stream into con- 
sciousness spring from one's own imagination in- 
stead of being produced by the outer impressions 
of our surroundings. Any imaginative thought 
may slip into our consciousness and may carry 
with it in the same way that curious feeling that 
it is merely the repetition of something we have 
experienced before. 

A striking illustration is well known to those 
who have ever taken the trouble to approach 
the depressing literature of modern mysticism. 
There we find an abundance of cases reported 
which seem to prove that either prophetic for- 
[58] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
tune tellers or inspired dreams have anticipated 
the real future of a man's life with the subtlest de- 
tails and with the most uncanny foresight. But as 
soon as we examine these wonderful stories, we find 
that the coincidences are surprising only in those 
cases in which the dreams and the prophecies have 
been written down after the realisation. When- 
ever the visions were given to the protocol before- 
hand, the percentage of true realisations remains 
completely within the narrow limits of chance coin- 
cidents and natural probability. In other words, 
there cannot be any doubt that the reports of such 
prophecies which are communicated after having 
been realised are falsified. That does not reflect in 
the least on the subjective veracity; our satisfied 
client of the clever fortune teller would feel ready 
to take oath to his illusions of memory ; but illu- 
sions they remain. He also, in most cases, feels 
sure that he told the dream to the whole family 
the next morning exactly as it happened; only 
when it is possible to call the members of the fam- 
ily to a scientific witness stand, does it become 
evident that the essentials of the dream varied in 
all directions from the real later occurrence. The 
[59] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
real present occurrence completely transforms the 
reminiscences of the past prophecy and every hap- 
pening is apperceived with the illusory overtone of 
having been foreseen. 

We must always keep in mind that a content of 
consciousness is in itself independent of its rela- 
tion to the past and has thus in itself no mark 
which can indicate whether it was experienced once 
before or not. The feeling of belonging to our 
past life may associate itself thus just as well with 
a perfectly new idea of our imagination as with a 
real reproduction of an earlier state of mind. As 
a matter of course, the opposite can thus happen, 
too ; that is, an earlier experience may come to our 
memory stripped of every reference to the past, 
standing before our mind like a completely new 
product of imagination. To point again to an 
apparently mysterious experience: the crystal 
gazer feels in his half hypnotic state a free play 
of inspired imagination, and yet in reality he ex- 
periences only a stirring up of the deeper layers 
of memory pictures. They rush to his mind with- 
out any reference to their past origin, picturing a 
timeless truth which is surprisingly correct only 
[60] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
because it is the result of a sharpened memory. 
Yes, we fill the blanks of our perceptions con- 
stantly with bits of reproduced memory material 
and take those reproductions for immediate im- 
pressions. In short, we never know from the ma- 
terial itself whether we remember, perceive, or 
imagine, and in the borderland regions there 
must result plenty of confusion which cannot al- 
ways remain without dangerous consequences in 
the court-room. 

Still another phenomenon is fairly familiar to 
everyone, and only the courts have not yet dis- 
covered it. There are different types of memory, 
which in a very crude and superficial classification 
might be grouped as visual, acoustical, and mo- 
tor types. There are persons who can repro- 
duce a landscape or a painting in full vivid col- 
ours and with sharp outlines throughout the field, 
while they would be unable to hear internally a 
melody or the sound of a voice. There are others 
with whom every tune can easily resound in recol- 
lection and who can hardly read a letter of a 
friend without hearing his voice in every word, 
while they are utterly unable to awake an optical 
[61] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
image. There are others again whose sensorial 
reproduction is poor in both respects; they feel 
intentions of movement, as of speaking, of writ- 
ing, of acting, whenever they reconstruct past ex- 
perience. In reality the number of types is much 
larger. Scores of memory variations can be dis- 
criminated. Let your friends describe how they 
have before their minds yesterday's dinner table 
and the conversation around it, and there will not 
be two whose memory shows the same scheme and 
method. Now we should not ask a short-sighted 
man for the slight visual details of a far distant 
scene, yet it cannot be safer to ask a man of the 
acoustical memory type for strictly optical recol- 
lections. No one on the witness stand is to-day 
examined to ascertain in what directions his mem- 
ory is probably trustworthy and reliable; he may 
be asked what he has seen, what he has heard, 
what he as spoken, how he has acted, and yet 
even a most superficial test might show that the 
mechanism of his memory would be excellent for 
one of these four groups of questions and utterly 
useless for the others, however solemnly he might 
keep his oath. 

[62] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
The courts will have to learn, sooner or later, 
that the individual differences of men can be tested 
to-day by the methods of experimental psychology 
far beyond anything which common sense and 
social experience suggest. Modern law welcomes, 
for instance, for identification of criminals all the 
discoveries of anatomists and physiologists as to 
the individual differences; even the different play 
of lines in the thumb is carefully registered in 
wax. But no one asks for the striking differences 
as to those mental details which the psychological 
experiments on memory and attention, on feeling 
and imagination, on perception and discrimina- 
tion, on judgment and suggestion, on emotion and 
volition, have brought out in the last decade. 
Other sciences are less slow to learn. It has been 
found, for instance, that the psychological speech 
impulse has for every individual a special char- 
acter as to intonation and melody. At once the 
philologists came and made the most brilliant use 
of this psychological discovery. They have taken, 
for instance, whole epic texts and examined those 
lines as to which it was doubtful whether they be- 
longed originally to the poem or were later in- 
[63] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
terpolatlons. Wherever the speech intonation 
agreed with that of the whole song, they acknowl- 
edged the authentic origin, and where it did not 
agree they recognised an interpolation of the 
text. Yet the lawyers might learn endlessly more 
from the psychologists about individual differ- 
ences than the philologians have done. They must 
only understand that the working of the mental 
mechanism in a personality depends on the con- 
stant cooperation of simple and elementary func- 
tions which the modern laboratory experiment can 
isolate and test. If those simplest elements are 
understood, their complex combination becomes 
necessary; just as the whole of a geometrical 
curve becomes necessary as soon as its analytical 
formula is understood for the smallest part. 

But the psychological assistance ought not to 
be confined to the discrimination of memory types 
and other individual differences. The experimen- 
talist cannot forget how abundant are the new 
facts of memory variations which have come out 
of experiments on attention and inhibition. We 
know and can test with the subtlest means the 
waves of fluctuating attention through which 
[64] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
ideas become reinforced and weakened. We know, 
above all, the inhibitory influences which result 
from excitements and emotions which may com- 
pletely change the products of an otherwise faith- 
ful memory. 

A concrete illustration may indicate the method 
of the experimenters. The judge has to make up 
his mind as soon as there is any doubt on which 
side the evidence on an issue of fact preponder- 
ates. If it can be presupposed that both sides in- 
tend to speak the truth he is ready to consider 
that the one side had, perhaps, a more frequent 
opportunity to watch the facts in question, the 
other side, perhaps, saw them more recently; the 
one saw them, perhaps, under especially impress- 
ive circumstances, the other, perhaps, with fur- 
ther knowledge of the whole situation, and so on. 
Of course, his buckram-bound volumes of old de- 
cisions guide him, but those decisions report 
again only that the one or the other judge, rely- 
ing on his common-sense, thought recency more 
weighty than frequency, or frequency more im- 
portant than impressiveness, or perhaps the op- 
posite. It is the same way in which common- 
[65] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
sense tells a man what kind of diet is most nour- 
ishing. Yet what responsible physician would 
ignore the painstaking experiments of the phys- 
iological laboratory, determining exactly the 
quantitative results as to the nourishing value 
of eggs or milk or meat or bread? The judges 
ignore the fact that with the same accuracy 
their common-sense can be transformed into care- 
ful measurements the results of which may widely 
differ from haphazard opinion. The psycholo- 
gist, of course, has to reduce the complex facts 
to simple principles and elements. An investiga- 
tion, devoted to this problem of the relative ef- 
fectiveness of recency, frequency, and vividness 
was carried on in my psychological laboratory. 
Here we used simple pairs of coloured papers and 
printed figures, or colours and words, or words 
and figures, or colours and forms, and so on. A 
series of ten such pairs may be exposed success- 
ively in a lighted field, each time one colour and 
one figure of two digits. But one pair, perhaps 
the third, is repeated as the seventh, and thus im- 
presses itself by its frequency ; another pair, per- 
haps the fifth, comes with impressive vividness, 
[66] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
from the fact that instead of two digits, sud- 
denly three are used. The last pair has, of course, 
the advantage in that it sticks to the mind from 
its position at the end ; it remains the most recent, 
which is not inhibited by any following pair. 
After a pause the colours are shown again and 
every one of the subjects has to write down the 
figures together with which he believes himself to 
have seen the particular colours. Is the vivid 
pair, or the frequently repeated pair, or the re- 
cent pair better remembered? Of course, the ex- 
periment was made under most different conditions, 
with different pauses, different material, different 
length of the series, different influences, different 
distribution, different subjects, but after some 
years of work, facts showed themselves which 
can stand as facts. The relative value of the 
various conditions for exact recollection became 
really measurable. They may and must be cor- 
rected by further experiments, but they are raised 
from the first above the level of the chance opinions 
of the lawyer-psychologist. 

All this remains entirely within the limits of the 
normal healthy individuality. Nothing of all that 
[67] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
we have mentioned belongs to the domain of the 
physician. Where the alienist has to speak, that 
is, where pathological amnesia destroys the mem- 
ory of the witness, or where hallucinations of 
disease, or fixed ideas deprive the witness's remem- 
brance of their value, there the psychologist is not 
needed. It is in normal mental life and its border- 
land regions that the progress of psychological 
science cannot be further ignored. No railroad 
or ship company would appoint to a responsible 
post in its service men whose eyesight had not 
been tested for colour blindness. There may be 
only one among thirty or forty who cannot dis- 
tinguish at a distance the red from the green 
lantern. Yet if he slips into the service without 
being tested, his slight defect, which does not dis- 
turb him in practical life and which he may never 
have noticed if he was not just picking red straw- 
berries among green leaves, may be sufficient to 
bring about the most disastrous wrecking of two 
trains or the most horrible collision of steamers. 
In the life of justice trains are wrecked and ships 
are colliding too often, simply because the law 
does not care to examine the mental colour blind- 
[68] 



THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
ness of the witness's memory. And yet we have 
not even touched one factor which, more than any- 
thing else, devastates memory and plays havoc 
with our best intended recollections: that is, the 
power of suggestion. 



[69] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 

As old as the history of crime is the history of 
cruelties exercised, in the service of justice, for 
the discovery of criminal facts. Man has the 
power to hide his knowledge and his memories by 
silence and by lies, and the infliction of physical 
and mental pain has always seemed the quickest 
way to untie the tongue and to force the confes- 
sion of truth. Through thousands of years, in 
every land on the globe, accomplices have been 
named, crimes have been acknowledged, secrets 
have been given up, under threats and tortures 
which overwhelmed the will to resist. The imag- 
ination of the Orient invented more dastardly tor- 
tures than that of the Occident; the mediaeval In- 
quisition brought the system to perhaps fuller 
perfection than later centuries; and to-day the 
fortresses of Russia are said to witness tortures 
which would be impossible in non-Slavic lands. 
And, although the forms have changed, can there 
be any doubt that even in the United States bru- 
[73] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
tality is still a favourite method of undermining 
the mental resistance of the accused? There are 
no longer any thumb-screws, but the lower orders 
of the police have still uncounted means to make 
the prisoner's life uncomfortable and perhaps in- 
tolerable, and to break down his energy. A rat 
put secretly into a woman's cell may exhaust her 
nervous system and her inner strength till she 
is unable to stick to her story. The dazzling light 
and the cold-water hose and the secret blow seem 
still to serve, even if nine-tenths of the newspaper 
stories of the " third degree " are exaggerated. 
Worst of all are the brutal shocks given with 
fiendish cruelty to the terrified imagination of the 
suspect. 

Decent public opinion stands firmly against 
such barbarism ; and this opposition springs not 
only from sentimental horror and from aesthetic 
disgust: stronger, perhaps, than either of these 
is the instinctive conviction that the method is 
ineffective in bringing out the real truth. At all 
times, innocent men have been accused by the tor- 
tured ones, crimes which were never committed 
have been confessed, infamous lies have been in- 
[74] 






THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
vented, to satisfy the demands of the torturers. 
Under pain and fear a man may make any ad- 
mission which will relieve his suffering, and, still 
more misleading, his mind may lose the power to 
discriminate between illusion and real memory. 
Enlightened juries have begun to understand how 
the ends of justice are frustrated by such methods. 
Only recently an American jury, according to the 
newspapers, acquitted a suspect who, after a pre- 
vious denial, confessed with full detail to having 
murdered a girl whose slain body had been found. 
The detectives had taken the shabby young man 
to the undertaking-rooms, led him to the side of 
the coffin, suddenly whipped back the sheet, ex- 
posing the white bruised face, and abruptly de- 
manded, " When did you see her ? " He sank on 
his knees and put his hands over his face; but 
they dragged him to his feet and ordered him to 
place his right hand on the forehead of the body. 
Shuddering, he obeyed, and the next moment 
again collapsed. The detectives pulled him again 
to his feet, and fired at him question after ques- 
tion, forcing him to stroke the girl's hair and 
cheeks; and, evidently without control of his 
[75] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

mind, he affirmed all that his torturers asked, and, 
in his half -demented state, even added details to 
his untrue story. 

The clean conscience of a modern nation re- 
jects every such brutal scheme in the search of 
truth, and yet is painfully aware that the ac- 
credited means for unveiling the facts are too 
often insufficient. The more complex the ma- 
chinery of our social life, the easier it seems to 
cover the traces of crime and to hide the outrage 
by lies and deception. Under these circumstances, 
it is surprising and seems unjustifiable that law- 
yers and laymen alike should not have given any 
attention, so far, to the methods of measurement 
of association which experimental psychology has 
developed in recent years. Of course, the same 
holds true of many other methods of the psycho- 
logical laboratory — methods in the study of 
memory and attention, feeling and will, percep- 
tion and judgment, suggestion and emotion. In 
every one of these fields the psychological experi- 
ment could be made helpful to the purposes of 
court and law. But it is the study and measure- 
ment of associations which have particular value 
[76] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
in those realms where the barbarisms of the third 
degree were formerly in use. The chronoscope of 
the modern psychologist has become, and will be- 
come more and more, for the student of crime 
what the microscope is for the student of disease. 
It makes visible that which remains otherwise in- 
visible, and shows minute facts which allow a clear 
diagnosis. The physician needs his magnifier to 
find out whether there are tubercles in the sputum : 
the legal psychologist may in the future use his 
mental microscope to make sure whether there are 
lies in the mind of the suspect. 

The study of the association of ideas has at- 
tracted the students of the human mind since the 
day of Aristotle ; but only in the last century have 
we come to inquire systematically into the laws 
and causes of these mental connections. Of course, 
every one knows that our memory ideas link them- 
selves with our impressions — that a face reminds 
us of a name, or a name of a face ; that one word 
calls another to mind ; that even smell or taste may 
wake in us manifold associations. But out of such 
commonplaces grew a whole systematic science, 
and the school of associationists began to explain 
[77] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
our entire mental life as essentially the interplay 
of such associations. There are the outer associa- 
tions of time and place, where one thing reminds 
us of another together with which we experienced 
it. There are inner associations, where one thing 
awakens in our minds something else which has 
similarity to it, or to which it is related as a part 
to the whole or the whole to a part, and so on. 
The word " dog " may call up in my mind, per- 
haps, the memory-picture of a particular dog, or 
the name of that dog, or the idea of a house in 
which I saw it; or it may bring up the super- 
ordinated idea, " animal," or the subordinated, 
" terrier," or the coordinated, " cat," or the part, 
" tail " ; or perhaps it may suggest to me the 
German translation for dog, or a painting with 
dogs in it: there are no end of possibilities. But 
the psychologists were not satisfied with grouping 
the various cases; their chief aim was to deter- 
mine the conditions under which they arise, the 
influence which the frequency or the recency or 
the vividness or the combination of special experi- 
ences has on the choice of the resulting idea. 
In the last few decades, then, has arisen the new 
[78] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
science, experimental psychology, which, like 
physics and chemistry, has its own workshops, 
wherein mental facts are brought under experi- 
mental test in the same way as in the natural 
sciences. With the application of experimental 
methods, the study of association took at once a 
new turn. In the laboratory we are not confined 
to the chance material which daily life offers; we 
can prepare and control the situation. For in- 
stance, I may use a list of one hundred substan- 
tives, and read one after the other to my subject, 
and ask him to give me the first word which enters 
his mind. I receive thus one hundred associations 
which are independent of any intentional selection, 
showing just the paths of least resistance in the 
mind of my man. I may use them, for instance, to 
make statistics as to their character: if the outer 
associations prevail, I have a type of mind before 
me other than in the case of a preponderance of 
inner associations ; if the superordinations prevail, 
I have an intellect other than if the subordinations 
were in the majority. Or I may study the influ- 
ences of preceding impressions. Perhaps I read to 
my man a story or showed him some pictures 
[79] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
before I gave him the one hundred words for 
association; the effect of that recent experience 
will show itself at once. In this way the variations 
are endless. 

But one aspect dominates in importance: I can 
measure the time of this connection of ideas. Sup- 
pose that both my subject and I have little elec- 
trical instruments between the lips, which, by the 
least movement of speaking, make or break an 
electric current passing through an electric clock- 
work whose index moves around a dial ten times 
in every second. One revolution of the index thus 
means the tenth part of a second, and, as the 
whole dial is divided into one hundred parts, 
every division indicates the thousandth part of a 
second. My index stands quietly till I move my 
lips to make, for instance, the word " dog." In 
that moment the electric current causes the poin- 
ter to revolve. My subject, as soon as he hears 
the word, is to speak out as quickly as possible 
the first association which comes to his mind. He 
perhaps shouts " cat," and the movement of his 
lips breaks the current, stops the pointer, and 
thus allows me to read from the clockwork in 
[80] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
thousandth parts of a second the time which 
passed between my speaking the word and his 
naming the association. Of course, this time in- 
cludes not only the time for the process of asso- 
ciation, but also the time for the hearing of the 
word, for the understanding, for the impulse of 
speaking, and so on. But all these smaller periods 
I can easily determine. I may find out how long 
it takes if my subject does not associate anything, 
but simply repeats the word I give him. If the 
mere repetition of the word " dog " takes him 
325 thousandths of a second, while the bringing 
up of the word " cat " took 975 thousandths, I 
conclude that the difference of 650 thousandths 
was necessary for the process of associating 
" cat " and " dog." 

In this way, during the last twenty years, there 
has developed an exact and subtle study of mental 
associations, and through such very careful ob- 
servation of the time-differences between associa- 
tions a deep insight has been won into the whole 
mental mechanism. The slightest changes of our 
psychical connections can be discovered and 
traced by these slight variations of time, which 
[81] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
are, of course, entirely unnoticeable so long as no 
exact measurements are introduced. The last few 
years have finally brought the latest step : the the- 
oretical studies have been made useful to practical 
life. Like many other branches of experimental 
psychology, the doctrine of association has be- 
come adjusted to the practical problems of educa- 
tion, of medicine, of art, of commerce, and of law. 
It is the last which chiefly concerns us here — a 
kind of investigation which began in Germany and 
has since been developed here and abroad. 

For instance, our purpose may be to find out 
whether a suspected person has really participated 
in a certain crime. He declares that he is innocent, 
that he was not present when the outrage oc- 
curred, and that he is not even familiar with the 
locality. An innocent man will not object to our 
proposing a series of one hundred associations to 
demonstrate his innocence. A guilty man, of 
course, will not object, either, as a declination 
would indicate a fear of betraying himself; he 
cannot refuse, and yet affirm his innocence. 
Moreover, he will feel sure that no questions can 
bring out any facts which he wants to keep hidden 
[82] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
in his soul; he will be on the lookout. As long as 
nothing more is demanded than that he speak the 
first word which comes to his mind, when another 
word is spoken to him, there is indeed no legal 
and no practical reason for declining, as long as 
innocence is professed. Such an experiment will 
at once become interesting in three different direc- 
tions as soon as we mix into our list of one hun- 
dred words a number, perhaps thirty, which stand 
in more or less close connection to the crime in 
question — words which refer to the details of the 
locality, or to the persons present at the crime, or 
to the probable motive, or to the professed alibi, 
and so on. The first direction of our interest is 
toward the choice of the associations. Of course, 
every one believes that he would be sure to admit 
only harmless words to his lips ; but the conditions 
of the experiment quickly destroy that feeling of 
safety. As soon as a dangerous association rushes 
to the consciousness, it tries to push its way out. 
It may, indeed, need some skill to discover the 
psychical influence, as the suspected person may 
have self-control enough not to give away the 
dangerous idea directly; but the suppressed idea 
[83] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
remains in consciousness, and taints the next asso- 
ciation, or perhaps the next but one, without his 
knowledge. 

He has, perhaps, slain a woman in her room, 
and yet protests that he has never been in her 
house. By the side of her body was a cage with a 
canary-bird. I therefore mix into my list of words 
also " bird." His mind is full of the gruesome 
memory of his heinous deed. The word " bird," 
therefore, at once awakens the association 
" canary-bird " in his consciousness ; yet he is 
immediately aware that this would be suspicious, 
and he succeeds, before the dangerous word comes 
to his lips, in substituting the harmless word 
" sparrow." Yet my next word, or perhaps my 
second or third next, is " colour," and his prompt 
association is " yellow " : the canary-bird is still 
in his mind, and shows its betraying influence. 
The preparaton of the list of words to be called 
thus needs psychological judgment and insight if 
a man with quick self-control is to be trapped. In 
most cases, however, there is hardly any need of 
relying on the next and following words, as the 
primary associations for the critical words un- 
[84] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
veil themselves for important evidence directly 
enough. 

Yet not only the first associations are interest- 
ing. There is interest in another direction in the 
associations which result from a second and a 
third repetition of the series. Perhaps after half 
an hour, I go once more through the whole list. 
The subject gives once more his hundred replies. 
An analysis of the results will show that most of 
the words which he now gives are the same which 
he gave the first time ; pronouncing the words has 
merely accentuated his tendency to associate them 
in the same connection as before. If it was 
" house " — " window " first, then it will probably 
be " house " — " window " again. But a number of 
associations have been changed, and a careful 
analysis will show that these are first of all the 
suspicious ones. Those words which by their con- 
nection with the crime stir up deep emotional com- 
plexes of ideas will throw ever new associations 
into consciousness, while the indifferent ones will 
link themselves in a superficial way without 
change. To a certain degree, this variation of the 
dangerous associations is reinforced by the inten- 
[85] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
tional effort of the suspected. He does not feel 
satisfied with his first words, and hopes that other 
words may better hide his real thoughts, not know- 
ing that just this change is to betray him. 

But most important is the third direction of 
inquiry: more characteristic than the choice and 
the constancy of the associations is their involun- 
tary retardation by emotional influence. A word 
which stirs emotional memories will show an asso- 
ciation-time twice or three times as long as a 
commonplace idea. It may be said at once that it 
is not ordinarily necessary, even for legal pur- 
poses, that the described measurement be in thou- 
sandths of a second ; the differences of time which 
betray a bad conscience or a guilty knowledge of 
certain facts are large enough to be easily meas- 
ured in hundredths or even in tenths of a second ; 
though measurements for the theoretical purposes 
of psychology require, indeed, a division of the 
second into a thousand parts. In the following 
legal division I shall, therefore, refer to differ- 
ences in tenths of a second only. 

The absolute time of associations is, of course, 
quite different for different persons; to link 
[86] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
familiar ideas like " chair »— " table " or " black " 
— " white " may take for the slow type more than 
a full second, while the alert mind may not need 
more than half a second. Thus we begin by finding 
the average for each individual, and all our inter- 
est goes into the deviations from this average. 
That a certain association should take one and a 
half seconds would be a very suspicious retarda- 
tion for the quick mind which normally associates 
in three quarters, while it would be quite normal 
for the slow thinker. And here, again, it may be 
mentioned that the retardation is not always con- 
fined to the dangerous association alone, but often 
comes in a still more pregnant way in the follow- 
ing or the next following association, which on 
the surface looks entirely harmless. The emotional 
shock has perturbed the working of the mechan- 
ism, and the path for all associations is blocked. 
The analysis of these secondary time-retardations 
is the factor which demands the greatest psycho- 
logical skill. A few illustrations from practical 
life may make the whole method clearer. 

An educated young man of eighteen lived in the 
house of an uncle. The old gentleman went to con- 
[87] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

suit a nerve specialist in regard to some slight 
nervous trouble of the younger friend. On that 
occasion he confided his recent suspicion that the 
young man might be a thief. Money had repeat- 
edly been taken from a drawer and from a trunk ; 
until lately he had had suspicions only of the 
servants ; he had notified the police, and detectives 
had watched them. He was most anxious to find 
out whether his new suspicion was true, as he 
wanted, in that case, to keep the matter out of 
court, in the interest of the family. The physi- 
cian, Dr. Jung, in Zurich, arranged that the young 
man come for an examination of his nerves. He 
then proposed to him a list of a hundred associa- 
tions as part of the medical inspection. The 
physician said " head," the patient associated 
"nose"; then " green "— " blue," "water"— 
" air," " long " — " short," " five " — " six," 
" wool " — " cloth," and so on, the average time 
of these commonplace connections being 1.6 sec- 
onds. But there were thirty-seven dangerous 
words scattered among the hundred — words that 
had to do with the things in the room from which 
the money was abstracted, or with the theft and 
[88] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
its punishment, or with some possible motives. 
There appeared, for instance, the word " thief." 
The association " burglar " seemed quite natural, 
but it took the boy suddenly 4.6 seconds to reach 
it. In the same way " police "— " theft " took 3.6 
seconds, " jail " — " penitentiary " 4.2 seconds. In 
other cases the dangerous word itself came with 
normal automatic quickness, but the emotional dis- 
turbance became evident in the retardation of the 
next word. For instance, " key " — " false key " 
took only 1.6 seconds, but the following trivial 
association " stupid " — " clever " grew to 3.0 sec- 
onds. " Crime " — " theft " came again promptly 
in 1.8, but the inner shock was so strong that the 
commonplace word " cook " was entirely inhibited 
and did not produce an association at all in 20 
seconds. In the same way " bread '" — " water " 
rushed forward in 1.6 seconds, but this charac- 
teristic choice, the supposed diet of the jail, 
stopped the associative mechanism again for the 
following trivial word. It would lead too far to go 
further into the analysis of the case, but it may 
be added that a repetition of the same series 
showed the characteristic variations in the region 
[89] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
of the suspicious words. While " crime " had 
brought " theft " the first time, it was the second 
time replaced by " murder * ; " discover " brought 
the first time " wrong," the second time " grasp." 
In the harmless words there was hardly any 
change at all. But, finally, a subtle analysis of the 
selection of words and of the retardations pointed 
to sufficient details to make a clear diagnosis. The 
physician told the young man that he had stolen ; 
the boy protested vehemently. Then the physi- 
cian gave him the subtle points unveiled by the 
associations — how he had bought a watch with 
the money and had given presents to his sister; 
and the boy confessed everything, and was saved 
from jail by the early discovery. The brutalities 
of the third degree would hardly have yielded 
such a complete result, nor the technicalities of 
legal evidence, either. 

Of course, this case is that of a highly sensitive 
mind with the strong feelings of a bad conscience. 
A professional tough criminal would not show 
such intense emotions, and hence not such long 
retardations, if he were as unsuspicious and un- 
aware of the purposes of the experiment as that 
[90] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
boy was. But what would be the situation of such 
a trained criminal who had no conscience and who 
knew beforehand that the experiment was to 
determine whether or not he lied or spoke the 
truth? 

In that case, another group of facts is to be 
considered. We might expect from such a subject 
very little lengthening of the simple association- 
time by emotion, but instead of it a considerable 
lengthening by conscious effort to avoid suspicious 
and dangerous associations, provided that he were 
anxious to hide the damaging truth. As soon as a 
critical word were offered, he would be on the look- 
out not to betray the first word which came over 
the threshold of consciousness, but to make sure 
first that it was harmless, and to replace it if it 
were dangerous. Experiment shows that such 
watching and conscious sanctioning takes time, 
and the replacing of the unfit word by a fitting 
word brings still larger loss of time; nobody is 
able to look out for the harmlessness of his asso- 
ciations and yet to associate them with the average 
quickness with which the commonplace ideas are 
brought forth. If the dangerous words show 
[91] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
association-times of unusual shortness, it is neces- 
sary to suppose that the subject of the experiment 
makes no effort to suppress the truth; the short 
time proves that he lets the ideas go as they will, 
without his sifting, sanctioning, and retouching. 
Even the best bluffer will thus be trapped in his 
effort to conceal anything, by time-differences 
which he himself cannot notice. 

As an illustration of a case of such a type, I 
may speak of experiments that I carried on re- 
cently for several days in a Western penitentiary 
with a self-confessed multi-murderer. He played 
the star witness in a trial against a man whom his 
confession accused as an accomplice. It made 
hardly a difference whether the view of the prose- 
cution or the view of the defence was taken: seen 
from any side, the witness offered a psychological 
problem of unusual interest. And its importance 
did not decrease when it was found out, through 
the verdict of the jury, that the defendant was 
innocent and had no connection with the crimes 
of the witness. No side doubted at any time that 
this was one of the most persistent murderers of 
modern time, and no side could deny that he was, 
[92] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
during the trial, an imperturbable witness with 
the mildest manners, with quiet serenity, and with 
the appearance of a man who has found his peace 
in God. 

The first problem for the psychologist was 
whether the confession of the witness was a chain 
of conscious lies or whether he himself really be- 
lieved what he told the court. No outer evidence 
was fit to settle this question of his mental attitude, 
and it seemed thus interesting to study whether it 
might be possible to decide it by the association 
method. 

I had the good chance to see the murderer at 
once on the witness stand. As my seat was at the 
small table of the attorneys for the prosecution, I 
had him only a few feet from me for careful ob- 
servation. I cannot deny that my impression on 
that first morning was very unfavourable. His 
profile, especially the jaw, appeared to me most 
brutal and vulgar ; I also saw at once the deforma- 
tion of the ear, the irregularity in the movements 
of the eyes, and the abnormal lower lip. That this 
was the profile of a murderer seemed to me not 
improbable, but that this man had become a sin- 
19S1 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
cere religious convert seemed to me quite incredi- 
ble. Yet, I did not consult my antipathies ; I had 
to rely on my experiments, which I started the 
following day. This is, of course, not the place 
to set down a scientific report of the nearly one 
hundred groups of tests and experiments which 
were completed ; they belong in scholarly archives. 
Most of them referred to the memory, the atten- 
tion, the feelings, the will, the judgment, and the 
suggestibility. Our interest here belongs only to 
the association experiments and to some related 
tests. Thus the report here covers only a small 
section of the case, and ignores entirely every- 
thing which does not refer to the subjective 
veracity. 

I told the witness directly that I had come to 
examine his mind and find out what was really at 
the bottom of his heart. He at once declared him- 
self perfectly ready to undergo any test. If he 
thought that he, the experienced poker-player, 
could easily hide his inmost mind and could deceive 
me with cant and lies, I turned the tables on him 
.quickly. I began with some simple psychological 
tricks with which every student of psychology is 
[94] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
familiar, but which were naturally unknown and 
somewhat uncanny to the witness. For instance, I 
covered one of his eyes and asked him to fixate 
with the other eye a little cross on the table, and 
to watch at the same time a cent piece which I 
moved at the side of the cross. Suddenly I told 
him that he would not see the cent any more — 
indeed, it had disappeared; and as he did not 
know that we all have a blind spot at the entrance- 
place of the optical nerve in the retina, he was 
much struck by my foreknowledge of such a defect 
in his eye. Or, I showed him the drawing of a stair 
which he saw as such; observing his eye move- 
ments, I told him that he now did not see the stair 
any more, but an overhanging wall, and again he 
was astonished at my knowing everything in his 
soul. In a similar way, I used some tactual illu- 
sions, and soon he was entirely under the spell 
of the belief that I had some special scientific 
powers. 

Then I began with a real experiment. I told him 

that I should call at first fifty words, and each 

time, when he heard a word, he was to name to 

me as quickly as possible the first thing which 

[95] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
came to his mind on the hearing of the word. I 
asked him not to choose the words intentionally, 
but to let them go without any reflection ; I added 
that I should learn all from the ideas which he 
would bring up. My first word was " river," he 
associated " water " ; then " ox," he said " yoke " ; 
" mountain," he said " hill " ; " tobacco," he said 
" pipe." All the interest thus seemed to belong to 
the choice of the words, and he saw that I wrote 
his answers down. But the fact is that I did some- 
thing else also ; I measured in fractions of a sec- 
ond the time between my calling the word and his 
giving a reply. Between his hearing of the word 
" river " and his speaking the word " water," 
eight-tenths of a second passed ; between " ox " — 
" yoke," six-tenths ; between " tobacco "— " pipe," 
eight-tenths. On the whole, seven to eight-tenths 
of a second was the very short standard time for 
those associations which represented familiar 
ideas. 

Now, there were mixed in among the fifty words 

many which had direct relation to his criminal 

career and to his professed religious conversion — 

for instance, the words confession, revolver, re- 

[96] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
ligion, heaven, jury, death, Bible, pardon, rail- 
road, blood, jail, prayer, and some names of his 
victims and of his alleged accomplices. Let us not 
forget that he was fully under the belief that I 
had a special power to discover from his spoken 
words the real tendencies of his mind. If he had 
had anything to hide, he would have been con- 
stantly on the lookout that no treacherous word 
should slip in. If a word like " confession " or 
something similar were called among harmless 
ones, he would never shout at once the first word 
which came to his mind, but would have watched 
that no dangerous secret, perhaps " confession " 
— " humbug," came out and betrayed him. He 
would have quickly suppressed the word before it 
was spoken — and yet, however quickly he might 
have done it, it would have taken at least one or 
two seconds more; and he would have used the 
longer time the more freely, as he had no reason 
to suspect that time played any part in the experi- 
ment. 

But the results show the very remarkable fact 
that the dangerous words brought, on the whole, 
no retardation of the associative process. After 
[97] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
" tobacco " — " pipe " came with the same prompt- 
ness " confession " — " truth," again in eight- 
tenths of a second, a time entirely insufficient for 
any inner deliberation or sanction or choice or 
correction: it is a time which just allows the 
speaking of the first idea which arises in the mind. 
" Heaven " — " God " took, again, less than a sec- 
ond, and so " religion "— " truth," "blood"— 
" knife," " governor " — " executive," " witness " 
— " stand," " minister " — " pulpit," " mine- 
owner " — " mine " ; only " pardon " — >" peace," 
" death " — " end," and similar more abstract 
words took about one and a half seconds, a time 
which is still too short for real inhibition and 
second thought. Even the names of his accom- 
plices and of his victims awoke associations in 
less than nine-tenths of a second. The fact that 
these associations were produced by the witness in 
the minimum time, which made deliberation im- 
possible, while he was convinced that the words 
would unveil his real mind, is strong evidence 
indeed that this man did not want consciously to 
hide anything, and that he himself really believed 
his confession. 

[98] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
If these experiments had been made with him 
before his confession, he would have stumbled over 
every third word, and many of his associations 
would have taken three seconds or more. He would 
have been unable, in spite of best efforts, to over- 
come the fear of betraying himself, and this fear 
would have retarded the associations in a way 
which would have trapped him unmistakably. But 
not only the short time, the choice of the associa- 
tions also indicated clearly that, in an almost in- 
credible manner, a mild, indifferent serenity had 
taken hold of his mind, and that his criminal life 
was of no concern to him any more. I gave him, 
for instance, the name of a city in which, accord- 
ing to his confession, he had been last to poison 
a victim and to dynamite his house ; but in his mind 
the place did not connect itself any more with 
murder; in less than a second his mind joined it 
with " ocean." 

It is evident from the association-times that no 
real emotion accompanied any of his memories of 
crime. He did not have and did not simulate a bad 
conscience. The emotional retardation of suspi- 
cious associations, characteristic of the average 
199] 






ON THE WITNESS STAND 
criminal, was, as expected, entirely lacking in this 
wholesale murderer. That does not mean that he 
lacks feeling ; my experiments showed the opposite. 
To be sure, his sensitiveness for pain was, as with 
most criminals, much below the average. A deep 
pin-prick did not produce any reaction, and his 
whole touch sense was obtuse, while his eyes and 
ears were very sharp. But, in spite of this lack of 
organic pain, — he has never been ill, — he is sensi- 
tive to the immediate perception of suffering in 
others. Simulation is excluded: I measured the in- 
voluntary reactions. He really shivers at the 
thought of hurting others. I have no reason for 
doubting that he had this mental sensitiveness 
always; and that is no contradiction to the fact 
that he was spreading pain all around. Nearly all 
his crimes were performed in an impersonal way; 
he did not see the victims. He manufactured in- 
fernal machines, laid dynamite in the mines and 
bombs under gates, and thought of the suffering 
of the victims as little as the manufacturer of 
children's toys may think of the happiness of the 
little ones. He assured me that in those fifteen 
years of heinous deeds he never struck any one 
[100] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
personally with his fist; that would have gone 
against his nerves. He exhibited tender feeling in 
all directions; he selected, for instance, very deli- 
cate colour combinations as those which he liked 
best among many which I showed him. His fa- 
vourite colour seemed to be dark blue; any showy 
or loud dressing is disagreeable to him. He asserts, 
even, that he rarely drank any strong drinks : one 
glass of beer made him sleepy. 

Yet his emotional life is simply dead — the small 
figures of his association-times would otherwise be 
quite impossible. And it may be added that even if 
his religious conversion is genuine, his so-called 
religion lacks also every sound and deep feeling; 
it is thoroughly utilitarian ; he serves God because 
he will reward him after death. 

The association experiments thus completely 
fulfilled their purpose: they gave a definite reply 
to a definite question which could hardly be an- 
swered by other methods of evidence. The asso- 
ciation experiments proved that the murderer did 
not try to hide anything. Of course, this was only 
the first problem to be solved in the case. From 
this state of subjective truthfulness which inter- 
[101] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
ests the psychologist to the proof of objective 
truth which interests the court is still a very long 
way. It would have been possible, for instance, 
that all this was pseudo-religious auto-suggestion, 
or that it was a systematic illusion brought forth 
by the suggestions of detectives and lawyers, or 
that the witness was hypnotised, or that his mind 
was diseased. The experimental inquiry had to 
study all those and other possibilities ; they formed 
the chief part of my experiments, but they do not 
belong here, as they have no relation to the method 
of association-measurement, which was the only 
concern of this discussion. 

Of course, the theoretical importance of the 
method is independent of the practical importance 
of the cases in which it is applied. Multi-murderers 
are rare; but the simplest case of wrong-doing 
may demonstrate the success of the method just 
as well. No sharper contrast could be possible 
than that between the brutal criminal with his 
dynamite bombs and the lovely little girl with her 
chocolate bonbons whom I had seen a short time 
before. She was anemic and neurasthenic, and 
could not concentrate her attention on her work 
[102] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
for her college examinations. She came to me for 
psychological advice. I asked her many questions 
as to her habits of life. Among other things, she 
assured me that she took wholesome and plentiful 
meals and was not allowed to buy sweets. Then 
I began some psychological experiments, and, 
among other tests, I started, at first rather aim- 
lessly, with trivial associations. Her average asso- 
ciation-time was slow, nearly 2 seconds. Very soon 
the word " money " brought the answer " candy," 
and it came with the quickness of 1.4 seconds. 
There was nothing remarkable in this. But the 
next word, " apron," harmless in itself, was 6 
seconds in finding its association, and, further- 
more, the association which resulted was " apron " 
- — " chocolate." Both the retardation and the in- 
appropriateness of this indicated that the fore- 
going pair had left an emotional shock, and the 
choice of the word " chocolate " showed that the 
disturbance resulted from the intrusion of the 
word " candy." The word " apron " had evidently 
no power at all compared with those associations 
which were produced by the candy-emotion. 

I took this as a clue, and after twenty indiffer- 
[103] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

ent words which slowly restored her calmness of 
mind, I returned to the problem of sweets. Of 
course, she was now warned, and was evidently on 
the lookout. The result was that when I threw in 
the word " candy " again, she needed 4.5 seconds, 
and the outcome was the naive association 
"never." This "never" was the first association 
that was neither substantive nor adjective. All 
the words before had evidently meant for her sim- 
ply objects; but "candy" seemed to appeal to 
her as a hint, a question, a reproach, which she 
wanted to repudiate. She was clearly not aware 
that this mental change from a descriptive to a 
replying attitude was very suspicious; she must 
even have felt quite satisfied with her reply, for 
the next associations were short and to the point. 
After a while I began on the same line again. The 
unsuspicious word " box " brought quickly the 
equally unsuspicious " white " ; and yet I knew at 
once that it was a candy-box, for the next word, 
" pound," brought the association " two," and the 
following, " book," after several seconds the unfit 
association " sweet." She was again not aware 
that she had betrayed the path of her imagination. 
[104] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
In the course of three hundred associations I 
varied the subject repeatedly, and she remained 
to the end unconscious that she had given me all 
the information needed. Her surprise seemed still 
greater than her feeling of shame when I told her 
that she skipped her luncheons daily and had 
hardly any regular meals, but consumed every day 
several pounds of candy. With tears she made 
finally a full " confession." She had kept her inju- 
dicious diet a secret, as she had promised her 
parents not to spend any money for chocolate. 
The right diagnosis led me to make the right sug- 
gestions, and after a few weeks her health and 
strength were restored. 

This trivial case with its foolish offence shows 
how psychological detective work may also be use- 
ful outside of the sphere of law. It not seldom 
becomes the serious interest of the educator and 
the physician to disentangle hidden thoughts, and 
the " third degree " of the school and of the con- 
sultation-room might easily be replaced by asso- 
ciation experiments. On such a basis the nerve 
specialist would frequently be able to make the 
right and helpful diagnosis without the aid of any 
[105] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
" confession " and without awakening in the pa- 
tient the slighest suspicion that his physician had 
discovered the real source of the trouble. Experi- 
ments have convinced me that the method may 
bring to light facts of which even the patient him- 
self is ignorant. Ideas which are connected in his 
deepest soul, but which he cannot bring up vol- 
untarily by mere effort of memory, are sometimes 
brought to expression by the mechanical devices 
of this association method. It seems that as soon 
as a number of associations have been produced 
under pressure of the desire to associate as 
quickly as possible, the mind enters into a state of 
decreased inhibition, in which suppressed and for- 
gotten ideas rush forward. 

This fact must become the more important, the 
more we learn, under the guidance of the Vienna 
School, that one of the most troublesome nervous 
diseases — namely, hysteria — results principally 
from suppressed affective ideas, and can be cured 
by awaking anew the restrained thought. Hysteria 
is " strangulated emotion," and disappears when 
the forgotten emotional ideas are brought to con- 
scious expression. One hysteric woman always be- 
[106] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
came mute after sunset; another could not take 
any food but liquids ; another was constantly tor- 
tured by the hallucination of the tobacco odour. 
Every physician knows a hundred such hysteric 
symptoms. No one of these patients knew the rea- 
son or origin of her trouble. Slowly the physician 
discovered the suppressed ideas, which had had no 
chance to express themselves and had worked dis- 
aster in their inhibited form. The woman who 
could not speak at night had sat once at sunset 
years before, at the bedside of her sick father ; she 
had vehemently suppressed every sound in order 
not to disturb him. As soon as this first scene was 
brought back to her mind, she regained her voice. 
The woman who could not take solid food had 
been obliged, years before, to suppress her dis- 
gust when eating at the same table with a man 
who suffered from an ugly disease. As soon as 
this starting-point was consciously associated 
again, she was ready to dine like others. The wo- 
man who smelled tobacco had long before heard by 
chance, in a room full of smoke, that the man she 
loved was in love with another, and she had had 
to suppress her emotion on account of the pres- 
[107] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

ence of others. As soon as she connected the smell 
again in consciousness with that first strangulated 
emotion, the hallucination disappeared. Hysteric 
contractions and anaesthesias, pathological im- 
pulses and inhibitions, can all be removed if the 
long-forgotten emotional ideas with which the dis- 
turbance started can be brought to light. Just 
here the association method seems sometimes 
helpful. The psychologist who seeks to discover 
the secret connections of ideas may thus, by his as- 
sociation method, not only protect the innocent 
and unmask the guilty, but bring health and 
strength to the nervous wreck. 

Yet our chief interest belongs to the legal as- 
pect of this method. Carried out with the skill 
which only long laboratory training can give, it 
has become, indeed, a magnifying-glass for the 
most subtle mental mechanism, and by it the 
secrets of the criminal mind may be unveiled. All 
this has, of course, no legal standing to-day, and 
there is probably no one who desires to increase 
the number of " experts " in our criminal courts. 
But justice demands that truth and lies be dis- 
entangled. The time will come when the methods 
[108] 



THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
of experimental psychology cannot longer be ex- 
cluded from the court of law. It is well known 
that the use of stenographers in trials once met 
with vehement opposition, while now the shorthand 
record of the court procedure seems a matter of 
course. The help of the psychologist will become 
not less indispensable. The vulgar ordeals of the 
" third degree " in every form belong to the Mid- 
dle Ages, and much of the wrangling of attorneys 
about technicalities in admitting the " evidence " 
appears to not a few somewhat out of date, too: 
the methods of experimental psychology are work- 
ing in the spirit of the twentieth century. The 
" third degree " may brutalise the mind and force 
either correct or falsified secrets to light; the 
time-measurement of associations is swifter and 
cleaner, more scientific, more humane, and more 
reliable in bringing out the truth which justice 
demands. Of course, we are only at the beginning 
of its development ; the new method is still in many 
ways imperfect, and if clumsily applied it may be 
misleading; moreover, there exists no hard and 
fast rule which fits every case mechanically. But 
all this indicates only that, just as the bodily facts 
[109] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
have to be examined by the chemist or the physi- 
ologist, the mental facts must be examined also, 
not by the layman, but by the scientific psychol- 
ogist, with the training of a psychological 
laboratory. 



[110] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 

If a girl blushes when a boy's name is mentioned 
in the family sitting-room, we feel sure, even if she 
protests, that he is not quite indifferent to her 
young heart. If she opens a letter and grows pale 
while reading it, she may assure us that the event 
is unimportant ; we know better. If she talks with 
you and every word makes you believe that her 
entire interest belongs to you and your remarks, 
it is enough for you to see that her fingers are 
playing nervously with her fan, and that her 
breathing has become deep and vehement and her 
eyes restless since a certain guest has entered the 
room ; you know she is hardly listening to you and 
waits only for him to approach her. And if he 
does not come, — she may be masterful in simula- 
tion and the artificial smile may never leave the 
lips, yet you will hear her disappointment in the 
timbre of her voice, you may see it even in the 
width of the pupil of her eye. 

Yes, the hidden feeling betrays itself often 
[113] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

against the will of the best comedian in life. It 

« 

may be easy to suppress intentionally the conspicu- 
ous movements by which we usually accentuate the 
emotions. It is not necessary to become wild with 
anger and to collapse in sorrow, we may even 
inhibit laughter and tears, and a New Englander 
will never behave like a Southern Italian. But the 
lips and hands and arms and legs, which are under 
our control, are never the only witnesses to the 
drama which goes on inside — if they keep silent, 
others will speak. The poets know it well. 
Through the dramatic literature of all ages is 
repeated the motive of the unintentional expres- 
sion of emotions. The ghastly memory of a grue- 
some past seems locked up in the hero's mind ; and 
yet when he is brought back to the place of his 
deed, it comes to light in his paleness and trem- 
bling, in the empty glaring of his eyes and the 
breaking of his voice. There is hardly a tragedy 
of Shakespeare in which the involuntary signs of 
secret excitement do not play their role. And the 
comedies of all time vary the same motive with 
regard to the lighter sins of love and social en- 
tanglement. The helpless stammering of the ex- 
[114] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
cited lover betrays everything which his deliberate 
words are to deny. 

But the signs which made Hamlet sure that his 
mother had committed murder have not been over- 
looked by those who are on the track of the 
criminal in our practical life. The suspected man 
who pales before the victim while he pretends not 
to know him, or who weeps at hearing the story of 
the crimes which he disavows, is half condemned in 
the eyes of the prosecutor. When the conspiracy 
against Dreyfus sought to manufacture evidence 
against him, they made much of the fact that he 
trembled and was thus hardly able to write when 
they dictated to him a letter in which phrases of 
the discovered treasonable manuscript occurred. 
Much of that which the police and the delinquents 
call the third degree consists of these bodily signs 
of a guilty conscience ; to make the accused break 
down from his own inner emotion is the triumph 
of such maladministration of law. 

It seems that even some of the superstitions of 

barbaric times which claimed to discover the guilty 

by all kinds of miracles sometimes contained a 

certain truth of this kind. They depended on ap- 

[US] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

parently mysterious signs which in reality some- 
times belonged to the bodily effects of emotion. 
Evidently primitive life sharpens the observation 
of such symptoms. One of the most adventurous 
" gunmen " of the West told me that when he was 
attacked by mobs he behaved as if he were con- 
stantly spitting; he went through such motions 
because it always discourages the crowd when they 
see that their adversary does not fear them, and 
they would know that a man who is afraid cannot 
spit — the emotion of fear dries up the mouth and 
throat. 

Of course, everyone knows how uncertain and 
unsafe such crude police methods must be. There 
cannot be justice if we base our judgment on the 
detective's claim that a man blushed or trembled 
or was breathing heavily. It would hardly be bet- 
ter than those superstitious decisions of early 
times. There are too many who believe that they 
see what they expect to see, and very different 
emotions may express themselves with very simi- 
lar symptoms. The door is open for every arbi- 
trariness if such superficial observations were 
to count seriously for acquittal or for conviction. 
tn6] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
But that provokes the natural question: cannot 
science help us out? Cannot science deter- 
mine with exacitude and safety that which 
is vague in the mere chance judgment of 
police officers? More than that: cannot science 
make visible that which is too faint and weak to 
be noticed by the ordinary observer? The by- 
stander watches the expressions of the strong 
overwhelming emotions — but can science, can ex- 
perimental psychology, not bring to light the 
traces of the whole interplay of feelings, the light 
and passing ones as well as the strong, and the 
most hidden suggestions of consciousness as well 
as heavy emotional storms? 

The question is indeed pressing, as the idea of 
the psychological expert in court cannot be with- 
drawn from public discussion. The mental life, — 
perception and memory, attention and thought, 
feeling and will — plays too important a role in 
court procedure to reject the advice of those who 
devote their work to the study of these functions. 
And especially the progress of modern psychol- 
ogy has been too rapid in recent years to ignore 
it still with that condescension which was in order 
[H7] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
at the time when psychologists indulged in specu- 
lation and psychological laboratories were un- 
known. To-day the psychologist operates with 
the methods of exact science, and the method 
which is here demanded seems entirely in har- 
mony with his endeavours. The problem is 
whether he can record objectively the passing 
symptoms and whether he can get hold of expres- 
sions too faint to be perceptible to our senses. 
But just that the laboratory psychologist is aim- 
ing at constantly and successfully. Whether he 
measures the time of mental acts or analyses the 
complex ideas, whether he studies the senses or the 
volitions, he is always engaged in connecting the 
vague inner impression with an outer measurable 
fact which can be recorded, and in throwing full 
light on that which escapes notice in ordinary 
life. 

In the region of feelings and emotions the ex- 
perimental methods of psychology have been cer- 
tainly not less successful than in other fields of 
inner life. To confine ourselves to that special 
problem which interested us from the point of 
view of law: the psychologist can indeed register 
[118] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
the symptoms of inner excitement and, more than 
that, can show the effects of feelings and emotions 
of which the mere practical observation does not 
give us any trace. Yet even the subtlest detective 
work of the psychological instruments refers only 
to the same bodily functions which make us visibly 
blush in shame, pale and tremble in fear, shiver 
in horror, weep in grief, perspire in anxiety, 
dance in joy, grow hot and clench the fist in 
anger. Everywhere the blood vessels contract or 
dilate, the heart beat changes, the glands increase 
or decrease their activity, the muscles work ir- 
regularly: but the instruments allow us to be- 
come aware of almost microscopic changes. We 
may, perhaps, point to a variety of lines along 
which such inquiry may move. 

To begin with a very simple group of processes, 
we may start with our ordinary movements of the 
arm: does feeling influence them? I can give my 
reply from a little diary of mine. I kept it years 
ago. It was not the regulation diary — there was 
no sentimentality in it, but mostly figures. Its 
purpose was to record the results of about twenty 
experiments which took about half an hour's time. 
[119] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
I had the material for these little experiments al- 
ways in my pocket and repeated them three or 
four times a day throughout several months. I 
fell to experimenting whenever daily life brought 
me into a characteristic mental state, such as emo- 
tion or interest or fatigue or anything important 
to the psychologist. One of these twenty experi- 
ments was the following : I attached to the bottom 
of my waistcoat a small instrument which allowed 
me to slide along an edge between thumb and fore- 
finger of the right hand, both outwards and in- 
wards. Now I had trained myself to measure off 
in this way from memory distances of four and 
eight inches. Under normal conditions my hand 
passed through these distances with exactitude 
while the eyes were closed; the apparatus regis- 
tered carefully whether I made the distance too 
long or too short. The results of many hundreds 
of these measurements went into my diary together 
with a description of the mood in which I was. 

When I came to figure up the results after half 

a year's records I found a definite relation between 

my feelings and my arm movements. My diary 

indicated essentially three fundamental pairs of 

[ 120] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
feeling in the course of time. There was pleasure 
and displeasure, there was excitement and depres- 
sion, and there was gravity and hilarity. The fig- 
ures showed that in the state of excitement both 
the outward and inward movements became too 
long, and in the state of depression both became 
too short; in the state of pleasure the outward 
movements became too long, the inward movements 
too short ; in the state of displeasure the opposite 
— the outward movements too short and the in- 
ward movements too long. In the case of gravity 
or hilarity no constant change in the length of the 
movement resulted, but the rhythm and rapidity 
of the action was influenced by them. 

Here were, for the first time, three distinct sets 
of feelings separated and recognised through 
three distinct ways of bodily behaviour. After the 
publication of my figures, others came from other 
starting points to such division of our feelings 
into three groups, while some believe that there 
are only two sets. Still others hold, and I should 
not disagree, that pleasure and displeasure alone 
are the fundamental feelings; that a colour or a 
sound is agreeable seems primary, that it is ex- 
[121] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
citing or soothing is secondary. On the other 
hand the number of those secondary feelings seems 
to me to-day still larger than it did at that time; 
I am inclined to accept many more simple feelings 
and find for everyone characteristic expressions of 
movement. All this becomes important as soon as 
the psychologist begins to explain the feelings and 
asks how far the sensations themselves enter as 
parts into the feelings. 

But what concerns us here is the fact that the 
pleasurable and the unpleasurable mood betray 
themselves in opposite movement — impulses of 
which we are unaware. I had meant in those hun- 
dreds of cases to make exactly the same out- 
ward and inward movements and yet the experi- 
ments disclosed the illusion. Of course, we all 
know how in joy the outward movements are re- 
inforced; the boy swings his cap and the whole 
body stretches itself, while in anger the opposite 
impulses prevail — the contraction of the fist be- 
comes typical. The experiments show that these 
various impulses are at work when we do not 
know and do not show it : we must bring the man 
before a registering apparatus to find out from 
[122] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
his motions without his knowledge whether sun- 
shine or general cloudiness prevails in his mind. 

But the unintentional movements may become 
symptoms of feelings in still a different way. The 
thing which awakes our feeling starts our actions 
towards the interesting object. All muscle read- 
ing or thought reading works by means of such a 
principle. The ouija-board of the spiritualists is a 
familiar instrument for the indication of such im- 
pulses, and if we want a careful registering of the 
unnoticeable movement, we may use an automato- 
graph — a plate which lies on metal balls and thus 
follows every impulse of the hand which lies flat 
on it; the plate has an attachment by which the 
slighest movements are registered on a slowly mov- 
ing surface. If the arm is held in a loop which 
hangs from the ceiling, the hand will still more 
easily follow the weakest impulse without our 
knowledge. Ask your subject to think attentively 
of a special letter in the alphabet and then spread 
twenty-five cards with the letters in a half-circle 
about him; his arm on the automatograph will 
quickly show the faint impulse towards the letter 
of which he thought, although he remains entirely 
[123] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
unaware of it. And if a witness or a criminal in 
front of a row of a dozen men claims that he does 
not know any one of them, he will point on the 
automatograph, nevertheless, towards the man 
whom he really knows and whose face brings him 
thus into emotional excitement. Still easier may 
be the graphic record, if it is not necessary to 
show a definite direction but simply a sudden re- 
action. The hand may lie on a rubber bulb or on 
a capsule covered with very elastic rubber and the 
slightest movement of the fingers will press the air 
in the capsule which, through a rubber tube, is 
conducted to a little bulb that pushes a lever and 
the lever registers its up and down motions. The 
accused may believe himself to be motionless, and 
yet when he hears the dangerous name of the place 
of his crime or of an accomplice, his unintentional 
muscle contraction will be registered. It is only a 
question of technique thus to take exact record of 
the faintest trembling when a little cap is attached 
to the finger. 

The emotional interest may betray itself in an 
interesting way even through movements which are 
ordinarily not consciously guided like those of our 
[124] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
hands and fingers ; I am thinking of the eye move- 
ments. I found that our eyes may go their own 
way without our knowledge. My subject, for in- 
stance, looks straight forward; I show him a card 
with a printed word which is indifferent to him. 
We have agreed beforehand that after seeing and 
reading the card he is to close his eyes, to turn 
his head somewhat sidewards, and then to open his 
eyes again. The experiment shows that if he does 
perform these acts, his eyes, after the sideward 
movement of his head, look in the same direction 
in which his head points. I repeat this several 
times ; always with the same result. Now I take a 
card with a word which, I know, is emotionally im- 
portant to mv subject from an earlier experience. 
The result is suddenly changed : he reads it, closes 
his eyes, turns his head, opens his eyes again, and, 
without his knowledge, his eyes have not followed 
his head but are still turned towards the exciting 
word — the feeling interest has been betrayed by 
the unintentional backward rotation of the eye- 
balls. I may show in this way to the suspected man 
one indifferent thing after another; his eyes will 
follow his head. Then I show an object which was 
[125] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
instrumental in the crime or which was present at 
the place of the deed or which belonged to the 
victim and, if he recognises it, his eyes will stick 
to it while his head is moving and after. Yes, the 
police know from old experience that not only 
do the eyes want to be back at the exciting scene, 
but the whole man is magnetically drawn to the 
spot where the crime was committed. Dostojewski 
shows us how the murderer, almost against his own 
will, returns to the place of his emotion and thus 
runs upon his doom. 

We are still speaking, of course, of movements 
and yet of an entirely different process if we con- 
sider the breathing. Our inspirations and expira- 
tions can be registered in finest detail and a variety 
of elegant methods are available. Perhaps the 
simplest " pneumograph " consists of a tube made 
of spiral wire and covered with rubber, to be at- 
tached by ribbons to the chest. Every respiratory 
movement lengthens and shortens the tube, and this 
presses a part of the air contained into a little 
capsule, the cover of which follows the changing 
pressure of the air and moves a registering lever, 
usually a large straw which enlarges the move- 
[126] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
ments of the cover. The end of the straw but 
touches the smoked surface of a slowly revolving 
drum; it thus writes in the thin layer of smoke a 
wave line which shows the subtlest features of the 
breathing. It is a simple task to measure every ele- 
ment of such a curve, every change in the length, 
in the height, in the angle, in the regularity of the 
wave; and that means every change in the rapid- 
ity, rhythm, distribution, pauses and strength of 
the breathing. As soon as such delicate methods of 
registration are applied, the intimate relation be- 
tween feeling and breath becomes evident. Pleas- 
ure, for instance, makes the respiration weaker 
and quicker ; displeasure, stronger and slower ; ex- 
citement makes it stronger and quicker; acquies- 
cence, weaker and slower. But such generalisa- 
tions cannot do any justice to the manifoldness of 
changes that may occur: every ripple on the in- 
terests of the mind reflects itself in the changes of 
the pneumographic wave — it may be an agreeable 
or disagreeable smell or taste, it may be exciting 
or depressing news from without or a fancy from 
within. 

The same holds true for the heart beat, meas- 
[127] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
ured by the blood wave in the arteries; such a 
pulse writer is called a sphygmograph. It may be 
attached, for instance, to the wrist; a delicate 
lever presses against the wall of the blood vessel 
just where the finger of the physician would feel 
the pulse. The lever is attached again to the thin 
rubber which covers an air chamber, and the 
changing pressure of air is again transmitted to 
a long straw which writes an enlarged record of 
the movement on the revolving drum, rotating 
regularly by means of clockwork. Here again the 
height and length and form of every pulse beat 
may have its own physiognomy. When we write 
pulse and breathing together on the same drum, 
we see at once that even every ordinary inspiration 
changes the pulse ; while we inhale we have a pulse 
different from the pulse while we exhale. Far more 
influential are the feelings. Again it is only an in- 
sufficient abstraction if we generalise and say: 
pleasure heightens and retards the pulse, dis- 
pleasure weakens and accelerates it, or excitement 
makes the pulse stronger and quicker, acquies- 
cence weaker and slower. But there is still another 
way open to observe the changes in our blood 
[128] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
vessels. We may examine the quantity of blood, 
for instance, which streams to a limb, by means of 
the so-called plethysmograph. The arm is held by 
a large tube filled with water ; a rubber ring closes 
the tube. The change of blood supply which 
makes the arm swell changes the pressure which 
the water exerts against the air, which is again 
conducted through a rubber tube to a recording 
lever ; every emotional excitement speaks in the 
blood supply of every limb. All these instruments 
of registration have belonged for decades to the 
household equipment of every physiological lab- 
oratory ; it was therefore a sad spectacle when re- 
cently scores of American papers told their read- 
ers that I had invented the sphygmograph and 
automatograph and plethysmograph this summer 
— they might just as well have added that I in- 
vented the telegraph last spring. To recent years 
belongs only the application of these instruments 
for the study of feelings and emotions. 

But we may go still further and point to ex- 
pressions of emotions which are entirely beyond 
human senses. If we put our hands on two copper 
plates and make the weak galvanic current of a 
[129] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
battery run through the plates and our body, we 
can, with the help of a delicate galvanometer, 
measure the slightest variations of the resistance 
to the current. Experiment shows that such 
changes occur, indeed, if our brain is excited ; any 
emotional disturbance influences the resistance: it 
seems that the activity of the sweat-glands in the 
skin is under the nervous influence of our feelings, 
and the functioning of these glands alters the 
electrical conditions. A word we hear may excite 
us and at once the needle of the galvanometer be- 
comes restless : there is no more uncanny betrayal 
of our inmost mind. Or we may point to the curi- 
ous facts of the knee jerk. A little hammer falls 
always from the same height on the tendon of the 
knee, and every time the leg makes a jerking re- 
flex movement, the angle of which can be regis- 
tered. Experiment shows again that this angle 
changes with the emotional excitement of the 
mind; evidently the brain sends impulses down to 
the lower part of the spinal cord where the knee 
reflex is produced, and the emotion inhibits those 
messages and changes the whole function. Even 
the temperature of the body seems to be influenced 
[130] 






THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
by excitement; the experienced physician knows 
how the emotion of the patient can change his 
feverish state, and experiment seems to indicate 
similar changes for the normal state. 

There is thus really no doubt that experimental 
psychology can furnish amply everything which 
the court demands: it can register objectively the 
symptoms of the emotions and make the observa- 
tion thus independent of chance judgment, and, 
moreover, it can trace emotions through involun- 
tary movements, breathing, pulse, and so on, where 
ordinary observation fails entirely. And yet, it 
seems to me that a great reluctance and even a cer- 
tain scepticism as to the practical application of 
these methods is still in order. Firstly, the studies 
in this field of the bodily registration of emotion 
are still in their beginnings and so far many dif- 
ficulties are not overcome; there are still contra- 
dictions in the results of various scholars. Es- 
pecially we know too little yet about the evident 
individual differences to make, for instance, a 
breathing and pulse curve to-day a basis for a 
legal condemnation or acquittal. The facts them- 
selves are so complicated that much further work 
[131] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
must be done before we can disentangle the practi- 
cal situations. 

Secondly, experiment gives us so far not suffi- 
cient hold for the discrimination of the guilty 
conscience and the emotional excitement of the 
innocent. The innocent man, especially the nervous 
man, may grow as much excited on the wit- 
ness stand as the criminal when the victim and 
the means of the crime are mentioned; his fear 
that he may be condemned unjustly may influence 
his muscles, glands and blood vessels as strongly 
as if he were guilty. Experimental psychology 
cannot wish to imitate with its subtle methods the 
injustice of barbarous police methods. The real 
use of the experimental emotion-method is there- 
fore so far probably confined to those cases in 
which it is to be found out whether a suspected 
person knows anything about a certain place or 
man or thing. Thus if a new name, for instance, 
is brought in, the method is reliable ; the innocent, 
who never heard the name before, will not be 
more excited if he hears that one among a dozen 
others; the criminal, who knows the name as that 
of a witness of the crime, will show the emotional 
[132] 



THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
symptoms. And yet, it may be rash to propose 
narrow limits for the practical use, as the rapid 
progress of experimental crimino-psychology 
may solve to-morrow those difficulties which seem 
still to stand in the way to-day. 



[133] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 

It is a sad story which I am going to report, a 
weird tragedy of yesterday. I am most seriously 
convinced that it is a tragedy not only of crime 
but also of human error and miscarried justice, 
and my scientific conscience as a psychologist com- 
pels me to speak of it because the tragedy of yes- 
terday may come up again, in some other form, 
to-morrow. 

I am the last one to desire for the modern psy- 
chologist a special privilege to meddle with the 
daily affairs of practical life. Far too often the 
M new " psychology has been made a kind of Jack- 
of-all-trades. Psychology has had to furnish the 
patent medicine for all the defects of our schools, 
psychology has become the word to conjure with 
in literature and religion, in social troubles and 
economic emergencies, and the public can hardly 
imagine how a psychologist's mail is burdened with 
inquiries from superstitious and unbalanced minds 
and with reports of uncanny and mysterious hap- 
[137] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
penings. Wherever experience seems unexplain- 
able, the psychologist is expected at least to 
pigeon-hole and to label the occurrence and to 
give his official sanction that such strange things 
may sometimes happen. Yet, the psychologist can 
hardly glance over such letters without wishing 
that the public at least might know how much 
wiser it would be to consult a detective. No mental 
explanation is in order till the facts themselves 
are cleared up by methods for which the scholar 
is not prepared at all. His steady contact with 
seekers for truth makes him least suspicious of the 
thousand sources of delusion and deception which 
an attorney may find out, but not a scholar. 

But if the psychologist has thus not seldom the 
wish that the detective were consulted in his place, 
that does not prevent his regretting sometimes 
that the world relies on the detective instead of 
calling in the psychologist. The more the scientific 
analysis and explanation of mental life makes 
progress through the experimental and physio- 
logical, comparative and clinical methods, the more 
we learn how subtle the internal connections are 
and how insufficient the popular psychology must 
[138] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
be with which the facts of life are usually inter- 
preted by detectives and attorneys, by juries and 
judges. To be sure, they all respect the physician 
who examines whether the criminal was insane or 
mentally disordered. But between the common- 
sense of the average juryman and the medical 
science of the alienist the world of criminal facts 
cannot be divided fairly. The detective may bring 
out much evidence which lies outside of the realm 
of physicians, which yet may be a closed book 
to the naive view of psychical life. In such case 
the psychologist feels it his duty fearlessly to 
oppose the popular prejudice. 

Just this was the situation when I ventured last 
year to write a letter to a well-known nerve 
specialist in Chicago who had privately asked my 
opinion as a psychologist in the case of a man 
condemned to death for murder. The man had 
confessed the crime. Yet I felt sure that he was 
innocent. My letter somehow reached the papers 
and I became the target for editorial sharp- 
shooters everywhere. I have before me still a col- 
lection of such specimens. " Harvard's Contempt 
of Court " is the big heading here, " Science Gone 
[139] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
Crazy " the heading there, and so it went on in 
the papers, while every mail brought an epistolary 
chorus. The efforts of the attorneys to change the 
condemned man's fate by a motion for a super- 
sedeas before the Supreme Court were unsuccess- 
ful. One week later the accused was hanged; yet, 
if scientific conviction has the right to stand 
frankly for the truth, I have to say again that 
he was hanged for a crime of which he was no more 
guilty than you or I, and the only difference 
which the last few months have brought about is 
the fact that, as I have been informed on good 
authority, the most sober-minded people of Chi- 
cago to-day share this sad opinion. 

I felt sure from the first that no one was to be 
blamed. Court and jury had evidently done their 
best to find the facts and to weigh the evidence; 
they are not to be expected to be experts in the 
analysis of unusual mental states. The proof of 
the alibi seemed sufficient to some, but insufficient 
to others ; most various facts allowed of different 
interpretation, but all hesitation had to be over- 
come by the one fundamental argument which 
excluded every doubt: there was a complete con- 
[ 140] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
fession. And if the sensational press did not 
manifest a judicial temper, that seemed this time 
very excusable. The whole population had been at 
the highest nervous tension from the frequency of 
brutal murders in the streets of Chicago. Too 
often the human beast escaped justice: this time 
at last they had found the villain who confessed — 
he at least was not to escape the gallows. For 
many years no murder case had so deeply excited 
the whole city. Truly, as long as a demand for 
further psychological inquiry appeared to the 
masses simply as " another way of possibly cheat- 
ing justice " and as a method tending " towards 
emasculating court procedure and discouraging 
and disgusting every faithful officer of the law," 
the newspapers were almost in duty bound to rush 
on in the tracks of popular prejudice. 

I took it thus gladly as a noble outburst of 
Chicago feeling against my " long-distance impu- 
dence " that a leading paper resumed the situation 
in this way : " Illinois has quite enough of people 
with an itching mania for attending to other 
people's business without importing impertinence 
from Massachusetts. This crime itself, no matter 
[141] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
who may be the criminal, was one of the frightful 
fruits of a sickly paltering with the stern admin- 
istration of law. We do not want any directions 
from Harvard University irresponsibles for pal- 
tering still further." This seems to me to hit the 
nail on the head exactly, and my only disagree- 
ment is with the clause " no matter who may be 
the criminal." I think it does matter who may be 
the criminal — whether the one whom they hanged 
or somebody else who is still to-day in freedom. 

But if I examine these endless reports for a 
real argument why the accused youth was guilty 
of the heinous crime, everything comes back after 
all to the statement constantly repeated that it 
would be " inconceivable that any man who was 
innocent of it should claim the infamy of guilt." 
Months have passed since the neck of the young 
man was broken and " thousands of persons 
crowded Michigan Street, jamming that thor- 
oughfare from Clark Street to Dearborn Avenue, 
waiting for the undertaker's wagon to leave the 
jail yard." The discussion is thus long since re- 
moved to the sphere of theoretical argument ; and 
so the hour may be more favourable now for asking 
[142] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
once more whether it is really " inconceivable " 
that an innocent man can confess to a crime of 
which he is wholly ignorant. Yet the theoretical 
question may perhaps demand no later than to- 
morrow a practical answer, when perhaps again a 
weak mind shall work itself into an untrue con- 
fession and the community again rely thereon 
satisfied, hypnotised by the spell of the dangerous 
belief that " murder will out." The history of 
crime in Chicago has shown sufficiently that mur- 
der will not " out." It is important that the court, 
instead of bringing out the guilty thought, shall 
not bring it " in " into an innocent consciousness. 
Of course in a criminal procedure there cannot 
be any better evidence than a confession, provided 
that it is reliable and well proved. If the accused 
acknowledges in express words the guilt in a 
criminal charge, the purpose of the procedure 
seems to have been reached; and yet at all times 
and in all nations experience has suggested a cer- 
tain distrust of confessions. The earnestness 
with which caution is urged is decidedly different 
at different periods ; the danger of accepting con- 
fessions seems to have been felt more strongly at 
[143] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
some times than at others. Has this perhaps de- 
pended on the nervous disposition of the crowd at 
various epochs? No doubt, the abnormal, hysteri- 
cal, neurotic tendency fluctuated greatly in pre- 
vious centuries in which the world was scientifically 
still unaware of its own nervousness and its own 
hysteria, and yet protected its social life instinct- 
ively against its dangers. The essential argument, 
however, against the trustworthiness of confes- 
sions had a purely social origin: it referred to 
possible promises or threats by other members 
of the community. No doubt, the chances for such 
influences were different, too, at various times and 
in different social conditions. The self-sacrificing 
desire to exculpate others has played its role occa- 
sionally also. In short, there is no lack of social 
motives to make it conceivable from the start that 
an accused makes of his own accord a confession 
against himself which is not true. Especially in 
the realm of the minor offences, promise and 
threat are still to-day constant sources of untrue 
self -accusation. 

Perhaps we can add still another motive which 
might induce a man in full possession of his under- 
[ 144] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
standing to declare himself guilty against his 
better knowledge. No statistics can tell the story, 
but we can suppose that persons suspected wrongly 
of a crime may, in the face of an unfortunate 
combination of damaging evidence, prefer to 
make a false confession in the hope of a recom- 
mendation to mercy. Every lawyer knows the 
famous Boorn case in Vermont, where the brothers 
confessed to having killed their brother-in-law and 
described the deed in full detail and how they 
destroyed the body; while long afterwards the 
" murdered " man returned alive to the village. 
The evidence against the suspected appeared so 
overwhelming that they saw only one hope to save 
their lives — by turning the verdict, through their 
untrue confession, from murder to manslaughter. 
To this group we might count not a few of the 
historic confessions in the Salem witchcraft trag- 
edy. The nearest relatives urged the unfortunate 
accused women to such confessions, seeing no 
other way of escape for them. 

But just those dark chapters of New England 
history can show us an abundance of other forms 
of confession which lead us step for step from 
[ 145 ] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
well-balanced calculation to complete alienation, 
through all the borderland regions of mental con- 
fusion and disintegration. Even the advice of the 
nearest relatives of those accused as witches was 
often not at all based on confidence. The prepos- 
terous accusations were for them too sufficient 
proof of guilt, and not to confess appeared to 
them as obstinacy. Thus they urged the poor 
women prisoners, starting from the conviction that 
the unwillingness to confess showed that their 
minds were wholly given over to Satan. " In many 
cases where they yielded, it was not from unworthy 
fear or for self-preservation, but because their 
judgment was overthrown and their minds in com- 
plete subjection and prostration." There can, in- 
deed, hardly be a doubt that in some instances the 
confessing persons really believed themselves 
" guilty." The reports agree further that the ac- 
cused persons, when they made up their minds to 
confess, " fabricated their stories with much in- 
genuity and tact, making them tally with the state- 
ments of the accusers, adding points and items 
that gave an air of truthfulness." 

Ann Foster at Salem Village confessed in 1692 
[146] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
that the devil appeared to her in the shape of a 
bird at several times. She further stated that it 
was Goody Carrier that made her a witch. " She 
told her that if she would not be a witch, the devil 
would tear her to pieces and carry her away — at 
which time she promised to serve the devil; that 
she was at the meeting of the witches at Salem 
Village: they got upon sticks and went said jour- 
ney," and so forth. Yet Ann Foster was not 
insane; the horrors of the accusation had over- 
powered the distressed mind. We should say to-day 
that a dissociation of her little mind had set in; 
the emotional shock brought it about that the 
normal personality went to pieces and that a split- 
off second personality began to form itself with 
its own connected life story built up from the 
absurd superstitions which had been suggested to 
her through the hypnotising examinations. 

The untrue confessions from hope or fear, 
through promises and threats, from cunning calcu- 
lations and passive yielding thus shade off into 
others which are given with real conviction under 
the pressure of emotional excitement or under the 
spell of overpowering influences. Even the mere 
[147] 



i 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
fatigue often brought to the Salem witches the 
loosening of the mental firmness and the intrusion 
of the suggestion of guilt. In tedious examinations 
the prisoners were urged to confess through many 
hours " till the accused were wearied out by being 
forced to stand so long or by want of sleep " and 
then gave assent to the accusation of having 
signed the devil's book. 

It seems like the other pole of the social 
world if we turn from these cruel court 
procedures to the helpful humanity of our 
hospitals for the insane. But the sounds of reckless 
untrue self -accusation are familiar there too to 
everyone who knows the scenes of misery in the 
ward of the melancholic patients. There is no 
judge and no jury, only the physician and the 
nurse, yet no torture of punishment can be harder 
than the suffering of the melancholic who feels 
remorse for sins which he never committed, for 
crimes of which he never thought before. Years 
ago his friend died ; now arises the illusion that he 
has poisoned him. The last fire in the town was laid 
by him ; he is guilty of the unpardonable sin. The 
slightest fault in his real past takes, in this illu- 
[148] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
sory affective state, new and gigantic dimensions ; 
long-forgotten mistakes awake with unproportion- 
ate feelings of anguish. The patient accuses him- 
self of meanness and deceit, of diabolical plans, 
and with growing accuracy he elaborates the 
minute details of his imaginary crimes. 

As a matter of course, when the physician 
speaks in the modern court-room the grave word 
Melancholia, the self -accusation cannot have any 
further consequences of a judicial character. The 
doors of the hospital are closed behind the patient. 
He may still be witness against others; but the 
confessions of crime which he claims to have com- 
mitted himself cannot be considered as evidence 
under any circumstances. And as the symptoms of 
melancholia and other depressive states with self- 
accusatory ideas are easily recognised, there 
remains hardly any reason for fearing lest such 
irresponsible fabrications of a diseased brain be 
taken as real confessions of an actual criminal. 
But does this give security for a proper rating of 
those illusory confessions which, like the absurdi- 
ties of the Salem witches, result from the tem- 
porary abnormal states of a not-diseased brain? 
[149] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
Hysterical and autohypnotic states may there 
combine with otherwise perfectly normal behaviour, 
and pseudo-confessions may thus arise in men who 
are distinctly not ill. A slight dissociation of mind 
may set in which does not suggest calling for the 
physician at all, and which may yet affect pro- 
foundly the admissions made by the accused per- 
son. Has the court sufficient means at hand to 
convince the jury that it must weigh all the evi- 
dence with a fair consideration of these not 
pathological, yet very influential, mental varia- 
tions ? 

Whether the crime was done in a state of mental 
responsibility is certainly a question never neg- 
lected. The mental status of the witnesses finds 
usually much less subtle analysis: the cross- 
examining lawyers turn their attention mostly 
backwards to the time of the crime and overlook 
too often the mental state at the time of the trial. 
But above all, the psychical state of the defendant 
himself during the trial is usually measured by 
the crudest standards of easy-going psychology 
which considers a mental life as typical and unal- 
tered as long as the man is neither insane nor 
[150] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
intoxicated. And yet it would be perhaps less 
exaggerated if we claimed that no psychical 
mechanism remains entirely unchanged when a wit- 
ness speaks under his oath or when a defendant 
faces the jury. The variations remain, of course, 
mostly within the limits of normal life, as we hare 
to call normal every setting which harmonises with 
the life purposes of the individual. But variations 
they are, nevertheless, and only the psychologist 
may be clearly aware of their tendencies. Practical 
life would be satisfied with the broad statement 
that the witness was excited, or anxious and timid, 
or felt himself important, or was eager to prove 
his view. How far really his mental possibilities 
were influenced, how far his perceptions, memory, 
ideas, imaginative acts, feelings, emotions, voli- 
tions, attention, judgment and ideas of self were 
altered through the situation is not considered and 
would be certainly unimportant in ninety-nine 
cases out of a hundred. 

Yet we must not forget that there is nowhere 

a sharp line to be drawn between the symptoms of 

real mental disease and the variations in normal 

personalities. There is no mental trait which be- 

[151] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
longs to mental diseases only; whatever we find 
in the asylums is made up of the same material 
that enters into the normal interplay of human 
minds. The order and harmony alone are dis- 
turbed; a single feature is grossly exaggerated or 
unduly inhibited, and by this abnormal increase or 
decrease of a regular trait the balance is lost and 
danger is ahead. Mental diseases are like carica- 
tures of a person ; in the caricature too every part 
of the face is the same as in the ordinary physiog- 
nomy, but the proportion is lost, as one special 
part, perhaps the nose or the teeth are grotesquely 
enlarged. All mental aberrations are such exag- 
gerated caricatures of the normal feelings, or 
emotions, or impulses, or memories, or imagina- 
tions, or attentions. And because the disease does 
not develop perfectly new features, but simply 
reinforces quite ordinary tendencies, it is easy to 
see that there is nowhere a sharp line between the 
normal trait and its pathological over-functioning. 
The motionless brooding of the melancholic 
patient is easily recognised, and yet the pessimis- 
tic temperament of many a normal man or woman 
generates all the features which are so sadly de- 
[152] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
veloped in the melancholic attacks. Even the self- 
accusations and the self -destructive despair of the 
melancholic find their counterpart in the realm of 
normal life; the pessimist is too often inclined to 
torture himself by opprobriums, to feel discour- 
aged with himself, and to feel guilty without real 
guilt. From these slight traces of temperamental 
type to the complete alienation of the hopeless 
patient there is a sliding scale of depressions. It 
leads through all the affective states of the neuras- 
thenic and other neurotic varieties. To recognise 
where the temperament ends and the irresponsible 
disturbance begins is made extremely difficult by 
the great breadth of the borderland region. Pub- 
lic opinion, and court and jury as its organs, are 
always inclined to claim that whole borderland 
field still for the normal life and to acknowledge 
the mental disturbance only when the disease 
region is entered. But modern psychology recog- 
nises daily more strongly that the subtlest analysis 
of the occurrences in the borderland field is abso- 
lutely necessary if the higher ends of social justice 
are to be reached. The courts show in all other 
fields that the progress of science breaks new paths 
[153] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
for them. It is, for instance, interesting to see how 
the neurasthenic states are slowly recognised by 
the courts in civil suits as real bodily disturbance, 
while a short time ago they were still considered as 
mere imaginations and illusory complaints. The 
time has come to take notice of the progress in 
psychology too. 

There is no less a transitional region for all the 
other mental activities. Everyone knows in daily 
life the type of the superficial, silly person whose 
attention is always shifting, and yet it is only an 
absurd exaggeration of such behaviour that char- 
acterises the alienation of the maniac. We know 
the sanguine type with its quick, sudden impulses, 
or the slow mind whose will appears always inhib- 
ited, as if every volition is checked by an inner 
resistance. We know the stubborn mind which can- 
not be persuaded by any logical argument and 
which sticks to its fixed ideas, and we know the 
suggestible mind which follows the last hint and 
believes everything, or at least everything which 
is printed. Every one of these features of a mental 
physiognomy may grow till its caricature stands 
before us as disease, and everywhere there are 
[154] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 

many steps between the extremes of pleasant origi- 
nality of character and the saddest mental abey- 
ance. The trait becomes psychologically alarming 
as soon as the balance is sufficiently destroyed to 
make the purposes of life impossible. Persons who 
perhaps doubt in the reality of the outer world 
may be found in the asylums and on the philo- 
sophic platform; whether the doubting mind is a 
patient or a philosopher shows itself quickly in 
the consequences: the philosopher includes that 
doubt within an harmonious life plan, the patient's 
life is destroyed by his insane doubt. 

This steady correspondence between the normal, 
slight variations and the hopeless disturbances, and 
the small steps of transition between the extremes 
are shown perhaps nowhere more clearly than in 
the field of memory. We differ from one another 
not only by good and bad retention of our experi- 
ences or by good memory for different spheres, the 
one for names, the other for faces, the one for 
figures, the other for sounds, but the disturbances 
and illusions of memory too are most irregular, 
and just as no two persons have exactly the same 
face, certainly no two have the same kind of 
[155] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
memory. Even unusual varieties may remain still 
fully within the limit of soundness. I myself, for 
instance, have absolutely no memory for the 
mental processes during sleep ; in other words, I 
have never in my life had a dream. When I talk of 
dreams in my university courses of psychology, I 
speak of them just as a blind man might speak of 
colours. Yet, mental processes go on in my sleep- 
ing brain as in other men, because my friends have 
often found that when they wake me up from deep 
sleep with a question, I invariably give at first an 
absurd reply full of reminiscences of the foregoing 
days ; but as soon as I am really awake, not the 
slightest trace of these comes back to my memory. 
Yet, this rare variety of memory is not an abnor- 
mal state, since it cannot interfere with the pur- 
poses of my life; and the remainder of mankind 
is, indeed, rather to be pitied for its dreams, which 
may bring a confusion of themselves with the real 
past. If most people were without dreams, the 
dreamers would have good reason to consult the 
nerve physicians and their mental state would 
be pigeonholed in the borderland region between 
normality and hallucination. Dreams are hallu- 
[156] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
cinations which become harmless only because the 
impulses to action become ineffective during sleep. 
I say that no field shows such a variety in normal 
limits as the memory, and this refers to its positive 
features as much as to its negative ones, as much 
to the remembering as to the forgetting. That we 
forget, is in itself certainly no defect and no 
pathological symptom. On the contrary, we could 
not fulfil the purposes of our life if we did not 
disburden our memory constantly of superfluous 
matter. We were lost if we had to keep in memory 
every face we have seen in the street and every 
advertisement we have seen in the papers. Our 
mind has to sift and sift. And we demand from 
our normal memory even that it follows somewhat 
our own imagination. We do not care to remember 
exactly as we experienced the impressions ; our 
perception is full of little blanks which our im- 
aginative memory fills all the time with fitting asso- 
ciations, and when we remember a landscape, we 
want to have the picture rounded out and do not 
care whether the wave of the ocean had exactly 
this curve and whether the tree had just this 
number of branches. We remember well when we 
[157] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
select the material, eliminate some parts worthy of 
being forgotten, and add from our own imagina- 
tion other parts well adapted to reproduce the 
original experience. 

But it is evident that this suppressing and sup- 
plementing of memory ideas makes us unfit for life 
when it assumes large proportions. If we cannot 
remember our previous experience, and if, in addi- 
tion to it, our own imagination deceives us by the 
delusion of pseudo-memories, we are of course 
completely lost in the social world, and the care of 
the asylum alone can protect us against utter 
destruction. Yet, who will decide when the limit 
is reached where we forget and supplement too 
much: nowhere is the borderland region broader 
and nowhere more important for the psychology 
of the court-room. We may move for a long while 
still in the realm of the normal. It may be pure 
fatigue which may decrease our resistance against 
the creeping of deceptive illusions into our 
memory. Or it may be a simple emotional excite- 
ment; no doubt, the mere fact of being on the 
witness stand awakens in many minds, by its im- 
portance and solemnity, an excitement which is 
[158] 






UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
especially favourable for opening the memory to 
suggestions and to confused ideas which group 
themselves around some ideas with strong feeling 
tone. Many a memory succumbs even to an im- 
pressive or a suggestive question. And more im- 
portant still is the suggestiveness of the whole 
situation and especially of its social elements. All 
that is still normal ; there is no education and no 
art, no politics and no religion without suggestion, 
and yet suggestion is certainly to a high degree a 
suppression of objective memory. But slowly all 
this leads over into the borderland region. Instead 
of a sound fatigue, there may be an over-fatigue ; 
instead of light emotional excitement, the deep 
affectional influence of alcohol or drugs; instead 
of the mild suggestive influence of the teacher and 
minister, the deep intrusion of the hypnotising 
physician or of autohypnotisation. All that is not 
pathological ; yet the abnormalities of the memory 
may have taken in the meantime dimensions which 
alter entirely the value of the reported recollec- 
tions. 

The untrustworthiness of memory under all 
such conditions has nothing whatever to do with 
[159] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
the intentions and the veracity of the witness. The 
average man knows anyhow very little of the work- 
ing of his own mind and his particular variations 
escape his attention. It is well known how many 
persons do not know even that they are colour- 
blind, or that they lack elements of imagination 
which are natural to others. A colleague once 
wanted me to hypnotise him because he had just, 
in his fortieth year, discovered that he had no 
power of optical remembering; he hoped to get 
it through hypnosis, and yet he had never missed 
it until he read of it in a psychological book. And 
only the other day I was consulted by a young 
woman who, up to her college days, had not dis- 
covered that other persons do not hear voices when 
they are alone ; she had heard them since childhood 
days and had felt sure that it was everybody's 
experience. The average person is unfamiliar with 
his psychical peculiarities and with the varieties 
and trickeries of his memory. They do not con- 
cern the physician either. But the psychological 
examination furnishes indeed to-day a kind of 
mental Roentgen rays which illumine the internal 
happenings. 

[160] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
We must not forget, moreover, that our knowl- 
edge of our own personality and its doing is also 
only a function of memory. We know of our- 
selves, in a psychological sense, through the 
connected memory of our actions and of our ex- 
periences, and this reproducing self-consciousness 
is open to all the chances and defects which be- 
long to our remembering in other fields. Our own 
doings, of which we know, perhaps, through our 
muscle sensations, are in themselves no better 
material for our reproduction in memory than 
the scenes which we have seen and the words which 
we have heard. As soon as the memory for 
our own past is completely lost, the pathological 
character is, of course, evident; and if the ideas 
which form our selves become dissociated and 
groups become split off as a second or third 
personality in us, no one doubts that such 
curious formations belong to the physician's 
domain. Yet here again we can reach the 
most hopeless forms through small steps from 
the experiences of our daily life. Every one of us 
is a different personality under different circum- 
stances. 

[161] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
The man in the office is not the man in 
family life; on his vacation trip, not the same as 
at work ; in the political meeting, not the same as 
in the theatre. New leading impulses, new groups 
of memory associations, new groups of feelings 
enter each time into play and change the whole 
aspect of our life. To be sure, the core of our 
personality is not touched by such daily occur- 
rences, and we can easily bridge over in our mind 
from the one state to the other. Just for this rea- 
son it does not interfere with the purposes of 
healthy action. But this growing up of a new 
personality, with its own impulses and separated 
by its own memories from our regular life, may 
again increase just like those other variations of 
memory. An emotional shock or a captivating 
impression may stir up long-forgotten memory 
ideas or push imaginative thoughts into the cen- 
tre and build around them split-off pieces of a 
dissociated mind into a new personality which can 
be, perhaps, hardly discriminated from the pre- 
vious self, but in which important emotions and 
memories may be distorted. And this alteration 
may affect more and more the deeper layers of 
[162] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
emotional thought and the whole man may be for 
a long time a new man before the outside becomes 
aware of it, or before he himself can explain the 
sudden changes in his attitudes and in his actions, 
in his judgments and his self-consciousness. The 
borderland region between the normal variations 
of personality and the complete pathological de- 
struction of the self demand thus the most earnest 
consideration in the court-room. 

And now I return to the distressing case of 
Chicago. Dr. Christison has set forth the entire 
murder case in a brilliant pamphlet which few 
will study without becoming convinced that an 
innocent man has suffered death by the rope on 
account of untrue confessions. It may be sufficient 
here to cite from it the following facts : On Janu- 
ary 1£, 1906, a young married woman was bru- 
tally outraged and murdered in Chicago. Her 
body was found, by the unfortunate defendant, 
lying face downwards on a manure pile in a barn- 
yard. The barn was about half a block distant 
from his home. He had to go there to attend to his 
father's horse. When he observed the body, he at 
once reported the matter to his father at the house, 
[163] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
and the father notified the police. The officers who 
inspected the premises found the woman's hat at 
her feet, but could discover no evidence whatsoever 
of a scuffle having taken place. Purse, shopping- 
bag and muff were gone. Around her neck was a 
hard-drawn copper wire, the ends being twisted 
together. 

The young man looked as if he had not slept 
during the night and the officers suspected him. 
The testimonies show that the young man was 
everywhere regarded as a thoughtful, obliging 
fellow of exceptionally good disposition, but often 
exhibiting marked stupidity. He never sought the 
company of women. All of his friends thought 
him decidedly trusting and credulous and absent- 
minded. He alternated between gay and morose 
moods. His most pronounced defect seemed to 
them his lack of initiative. His regular work was 
with his father at the trade of carpenter. When 
he came to the police station, he was told at once 
that he was the guilty man ; but the accused denied 
everything. 

Now the police began to press him and to sug- 
gest more and more impressively to him his guilt. 
[164] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
Suddenly he began to confess, and he was quite 
willing to repeat his confession again and again. 
Every time it became richer in detail. "At about 
6.30 I took her in the alley. I wrestled with her 
and lost my senses. She wanted to run," — and so 
on and so on. On this basis he was condemned to 
death. So the matter stood when my opinion was 
asked for, as above reported. I could not help be- 
coming convinced that all the external signs spoke 
against the interpretation of the jury. The young 
man's alibi proof, brought forward by his friends, 
seemed to me convincing. Everything seemed to 
point to the fact that the woman was murdered by 
an unknown person at another place, and that her 
body was dragged during the night by the copper 
wire coiled around her neck from another street 
to the barnyard. The so-called " confessions " 
themselves seemed absurd and contradictory and 
exactly like the involuntary elaboration of a sug- 
gestion put into the man's mind. His whole life 
history and the expression of his face were in full- 
est accordance with the suspicion that his mind 
was in a state of dissociation when he began his 
confessions. It seemed to me a typical case of that 
[165] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
large borderland region in which a neurotic mind 
develops an illusory memory as to its own doings 
in the past. After most careful scrutiny as far as 
the written and printed material allowed, I wrote 
thus in June in my much-abused letter that the 
confessions must be untrue and that the con- 
demned man had really nothing to do with the 
crime. I added at once, " It is an interesting case 
of dissociation and auto-suggestion ; it would need 
probably careful treatment to build up his disso- 
ciated mind again and thus to awake in him a clear 
memory of his real experiences." 

But when I expressed thus my firm conviction, 
I had, nevertheless, the uncanny feeling that there 
was something obscure in the case. I was unable 
to understand how the sudden change from denial 
to confession was brought about. To be sure, there 
were the sharp inquisitory questions of the police 
officers, and yet from a rather extended experience 
I could not imagine that without a sudden external 
shock or some overwhelming fascination such a 
conversion and such a disintegration could set in. 
Only a short time before a lady had come to me 
who showed quite similar blanks of memory for 
[166] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
several days, filling the gap with imaginative ideas, 
and she too did not understand why her personality 
had been changed so suddenly. But when I hypno- 
tised her, I understood what had happened. She 
had been in a nervous and over-fatigued state 
when her own physician bent over her, and the 
sharp sunlight reflected from his eye-glasses struck 
her eyes. At that moment she felt it like a shock, 
his eye-glasses seemed to become large and un- 
canny, and from that moment on her consciousness 
was split and her remaining half -personality de- 
veloped a pseudo-memory of its own. 

I had before my mind also the case of a certain 
religious conversion which Dr. Prince has recently 
analysed and described. It was the case of a young 
woman who, from a most distressed, restless and 
suffering state, was suddenly completely changed 
to a state of joyful excitement and happy ecstasy. 
She felt it as a spiritual " conversion " to health, 
and the complete change of her mental personality 
was indeed most surprising. She could not remem- 
ber that anything had happened which might have 
influenced her ; but when the physician hypnotised 
her in the interest of her ailments, everything 
[167] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
became clear. She had gone to church in a condi- 
tion of hopeless despair. The church was empty 
and, as she communed with herself, her hopeless- 
ness deepened. Then her eyes became fixed upon 
one of the shining brass lamps in the church, and 
of a sudden all was changed. She went into a 
trance-like state in which many disconnected memo- 
ries of her early life and of happy times rushed 
to her consciousness, each accompanied by emo- 
tion, and these long-forgotten emotions of happi- 
ness persisted. 

If there had been anything of such optical cap- 
tivation of attention, like the reflex of the eye- 
glass or the shining of the brass lamp, in the 
Chicago case, everything would have been com- 
pletely clear to me; without such fascinating 
stimulus, I could not account sufficiently for the 
suddenness of the change in the defendant's per- 
sonality. When I wrote my letter, I felt certain 
that if I had had a chance to hypnotise the con- 
demned man, I should have found out that some 
unexpected stimulus must have come in, must have 
snapped off the normal connections. I expressed 
this as my wish at that time, repeatedly. I could 
[168] 






UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
not foresee that all the explanation I was looking 
for would be furnished only a few days later by 
Nature herself. The unfortunate youth awoke 
suddenly from the awful spell. The period of dis- 
integration was suddenly again eliminated from 
the memory and the normal connections entered 
again into play. The same paper, which had in- 
sisted that the defendant must be the murderer 
because no innocent man would ever confess such 
a brutal crime, brought out a few days later a 
long report which began as follows: 

" With death on the gallows only six days away, 
he asserts his innocence of the atrocious murder. 
He declares he has absolutely no memory of having 
made to the police a confession . . . He as- 
serts that his only recollection of the coroner's 
inquest is that of seeing a revolver pointed at him. 
He said, * I saw the flash of steel in front of me. 
Then two men got before me. I can remember no 
more than that about it. Someone told me after- 
ward who the man was ; but I had not seen him at 
all and I don't recall seeing any other men even 
until after I had seen the revolver. I suppose I must 
have made those statements, since they all say I 
[169] 



OX THE WITNESS STAND 
did. But I have no knowledge of having made 
them, and I am innocent of that crime. From the 
time that I was arrested I do not believe that I 
was myself for a moment, until after I was over 
here in the jail. Everything about that time is 
a blur, a blank, to me. I can see through this blur 
the time in the station, when the police would bring 
me up every little while and tell me that I had done 
it. I know that the very first thing that the In- 
spector said to me when I was brought to him was, 
1 You did this.' I did not do it, and I knew that 
I did not ; but I do not know what I said or did 
during that time in the station. I wondered why a 
revolver should be pointed at me,' " and so forth. 
It would be absurd to fancy that this last turn 
of his mind was a made-up story to escape punish- 
ment. Through all those weeks of his half-dazed 
condition, he had never made the least effort to 
weaken his so-called confessions or to protect him- 
self in any way. Moreover, this stupid boy would 
be the last to be able to invent suddenly a long 
story which fits so exactly in every detail the 
clinical experiences of the nervous physician and 
the mental experiences of the psychologist. u I 
[170] 



UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 

saw the flash of steel in front of me." And from 
that moment everything became a blur and a blank. 
It was the one missing link in the chain of evidence 
of his innocence. He cannot even have understood 
that this flash of steel worked like the shining brass 
lamp in Dr. Prince's case or the reflecting eye- 
glass in that other case. He naively reported the 
whole truth, and with all the ear-marks of truth. 
He would have been absolutely unable to fabricate 
by his own efforts such scientifically exact observa- 
tions. What resulted when he begun to fabricate 
out of his own faculties was sufficiently shown in 
his " confessions," a contradictory mixture of im- 
probable and psychologically impossible occur- 
rences. Six days later the punishment of death was 
executed. 



[171] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 

It was in a large city which I was visiting for the 
first time. I went to see the hypnotic experiments 
of a friend, a physician for nervous diseases. He 
invited me to witness the treatment of a lady who 
had been deeply hypnotised by him for a local 
nervous disturbance. Her mind seemed normal in 
every respect. She was a woman of wealth and 
social position. When she was in hypnotic sleep, 
he suggested to her to return in the afternoon 
when she would find us both, and, as soon as he 
took out his watch, to declare her willingness to 
make a last will in which I should become the only 
Keir to all her property. She had never seen me be- 
fore and I was introduced to her under a fictitious, 
indifferent name. When she left the office after 
awakening from her hypnotic sleep, she did not 
take any notice of me at all. At the appointed 
hour she returned, apparently not knowing herself 
why she came. She found in the parlour, besides 
her physician and me, three or four others who 
[175] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
wanted to watch the development of the experi- 
ment. She was not embarrassed. She said that she 
had passed the house by chance and that she 
thought it would be nice to show her doctor how 
much better she felt and to ask whether there was 
an j objection to her going to the theatre. I then 
began a conversation with her about the opera. 
We talked for perhaps ten minutes on music and 
the drama, exactly as if we had met at any dinner 
party, and there was nothing in the least strange 
in her ideas or in her expression of them. 

Suddenly my friend asked how late it was and, 
as arranged, took his watch out of his pocket. 
There was a moment of hesitation. The lady spoke 
the next few words in a stammering way; but 
then she rushed on and told us that she had not ex- 
pected to find such a company, but that her real 
purpose in coming was to report to me that she 
had selected me as her heir and that now she 
wanted accordingly to make her last will. Up to 
this moment her action has been a mechanical 
carrying out of the post-hypnotic suggestion, but 
the really interesting part was now to begin. I 
told her that there must be a mistake, as she could 
[176] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
not have seen me before, and I mentioned a ficti- 
tious city in which I claimed to live. At once she 
replied that she had just spent the last winter in 
that city, and that she had met me there daily on 
the street, and that from the first she had planned 
to leave me all that she owned. I insisted that at 
least she had never spoken to me. Yes, in that 
same city she had met me repeatedly in society. 
I represented to her the unnaturalness of leaving 
her wealth to a stranger instead of to her children. 
At once she replied that she had thought it out 
for years, that it would be a blessing for the chil- 
dren not to be burdened with riches, while she 
knew that I would use them in a philanthropic 
way. The others took part in the conversation, 
scores of arguments were brought up to dis- 
courage her from this fantastic plan. For each 
one she had a long-considered excellent rejoinder. 
Finally, I told her directly that, as she knew, 
she had been hypnotised that morning and that 
this whole idea of the last will had been planted in 
her head by the witnessed suggestion of her physi- 
cian. With a charming smile she replied that she 
knew all that perfectly well, but that she did not 
[177] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
contradict and resist this proposition of the doc- 
tor simply because it by chance coincided entirely 
with her own cherished plans, which had been per- 
fectly firm in her mind for a year. She would have 
written to me some day soon if I had not come 
to town. She went on that she was unwilling to 
hear any further doubts of her sincerity and that 
she was ready to take an oath that she had made 
up her mind in favour of such a testament long be- 
fore she was hypnotised. To put an end to all this, 
she insisted that paper be brought to her, and then 
she wrote a codicil which left all her property to 
the fictitious man from the fictitious town. The 
doctors present had to sign as witnesses. I put the 
paper into my pocket, switched the conversation 
over to the theatre again, and, after a few minutes, 
she had evidently forgotten the whole episode. 
She treated me again as a complete stranger ; and 
when I asked whether she happened to know the 
city before mentioned, I was told that she had once 
passed through it on the train. When she left the 
house, she had clearly not the slightest remem- 
brance of that document in my pocket, which we 
others then burned together. 
[178] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
If I had been present as an uninformed stranger 
during that afternoon visit, I should have been so 
completely misled that I could not have thought 
of any additional inquiry or any further argu- 
ment to test the validity of the testimony. Every- 
thing seemed to harmonise with the one plan which 
had been put into her mind. All her memories be- 
came falsified, all her tastes and emotions were 
turned upside down, all her life experiences were 
mingled with and supplemented by untrammelled 
imagination, coupled with the strongest feeling of 
certainty and sincerity, and yet everything was 
moulded by her own mind, with the exception of 
that one decision which had been urged upon her 
from the outside. 

If a suggestion planted in a consciousness 
would remain there isolated, it would be easy 
to detect it. It would be in such manifold con- 
tradiction with all the normal reminiscences 
and habitual arguments that every court, for 
instance, would quickly recognise the strange 
thought as an intruder. But just this is the un- 
canny power of suggestion, that it at once infects 
all the neighbouring ideas and emotions and 
[179] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
forces the whole mental life of the personality 
under the unnatural influence. 

Of course, life does not often make such effec- 
tive experiments, and the danger seems small that 
judges or jurymen should ever be deceived by such 
an elaborate performance of a witness. Few per- 
sons only can be hypnotised to the degree that a 
post-hypnotic suggestion becomes so powerful. 
But it cannot be emphasised too strongly that the 
extreme abnormal changes in mental life go over 
by the smallest steps into the perfectly normal and 
habitual behaviour. The grotesque destructiveness 
of such a hypnotic revolution shows only an exag- 
gerated form of the dangerous working of sug- 
gestion which leads in a sliding scale down to the 
little bits of strange influences with their unrea- 
sonable reasoning, as when we read in the cars the 
unhypnotic suggestions of " cook with gas " or 
" read the Sun " or " wear rubber heels." 

The psychologist does not need, indeed, the hyp- 
notic state to demonstrate experimentally how 
every suggestion contaminates the most sincere 
memory. A picture of a farmer's room was shown 
to about forty persons, children and adults. Each 
[180] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 

one examined it individually and was then asked 
to give a report from the fresh memory image in 
reply to detailed questions. The picture had 
plenty of detail which could easily be grasped. 
The questions were partly indifferent and objec- 
tive. How many persons are in the room? Does 
the room have windows? What is the man doing? 
There were persons and windows and the man was 
eating his soup. But other questions, referring to 
objects not present in the picture, could pass 
through different stages of suggestiveness. Is 
there a stove in the room? is not so intense a sug- 
gestion as the express question, did you see the 
stove in the room? There was no stove in the pic- 
ture. Are there houses to be seen through the win- 
dows of the room? Does a lamp hang from the 
ceiling? The result showed that the replies to 
these suggestive questions were correct only in 
fifty-nine per cent, of all cases. Hundreds of times 
objects were invented in accordance with the sug- 
gestion of the question and this immediately after 
the direct observation of the picture, and without 
any personal interest in the falsified result. 
The experiments show that the resistance for 
[181] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

the young people is much weaker than for the 
grown-ups, for the girls weaker than for the boys, 
but they all were under perfect conditions of emo- 
tional calmness. Such conditions are not to be 
found on the witness stand under the excitement 
of the solemn court procedure ; there the resistance 
of the adult persons may sink to the low level of 
that of the boys and girls. Above all, the experi- 
ments show that at all ages the positive effect of 
the suggestion works itself out in minute and con- 
crete detail. As soon as the subject has answered 
that there is a stove in the room, he is at once 
ready to reply by a positive statement to the 
further question, where is the stove standing? 
The one says on the left, the other on the right; 
one in the corner, and one against the middle of 
the wall, each simply following the path of least 
resistance in his own imagination. The experi- 
ments allowed a complete gradation of the sug- 
gestive power of the various questions. The gown 
of the farmer's wife was red. It was sufficient to 
ask whether the gown was blue or green to elim- 
inate for many the red entirely from memory. 
And with the suggestiveness of the question the 
[182] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
readiness to elaborate their own inventions stead- 
ily increased. Experiments of this kind have been 
carried on with almost identical results in different 
nations with persons of different ages and profes- 
sions with most varied material, and every time the 
power of a suggestive question to break down the 
true memory appears alarming. But whoever has 
studied these protocols of the psychological lab- 
oratories cannot help feeling that many cross-ex- 
aminations in court are only continuations of the 
interesting tests carried on to demonstrate that 
there is nothing more suggestive for some persons 
than a skilful question. Their influence may set 
in long before the lawyer of the other side rejects 
a too clumsy suggestion as an unallowed " lead- 
ing question." 

Of course, the illusory effect of a suggestion 
need not wait till the labour of the memory sets in. 
Our perceptions themselves may be distorted 
through suggestive influences. Experimental psy- 
chology can demonstrate it and at the same time 
test it in a thousand forms. Of course, such little 
psychological laboratory experiments seem petty 
and far removed from the reality of life experi- 
[183] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
ence, as they can offer nothing but a dry sche- 
matic pattern. Yet this is a complete misunder- 
standing. Not the weakness of the experiments 
but their strength lies in their schematic char- 
acter. All the experimental sciences teach us to 
understand the world by bringing its manifoldness 
to the simplest formula. The physicist too does 
not wait till the lightning breaks through the 
clouds; he does not need the thunder storm. The 
small electrical machine on his laboratory table 
can teach him in a much more instructive way 
what factors determine the electric discharge. 
The artificial schematisation shows the connections 
between cause and effect alone. Thus we do not 
need in the laboratory the erratic play of emotions 
and prejudices which suggestions and persuasions 
may stir up in the chaos of practical life. We 
recognise the essential features just as well in the 
slight changes of perceptive judgment with the 
tiny material of our workshop. 

If I have, for instance, on the one side of my 
table thirty little squares of grey paper and on 
the other side the same number of the same ma- 
terial, and I ask the subject to decide without 
[184] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
counting on which of the two sides there are more 
of the grey squares, I can easily arrange that he 
sees more on whichever side I want him to. I find, 
perhaps, that his judgment depends upon the 
grouping, that those thirty pieces suggest dif- 
ferent numbers according as they lie in regular 
lines or in irregular disorder; according as they 
are shut off in small groups or grouped in one 
circle ; surrounded by a frame, or accentuated by 
a few ink spots, or brightened by a light back- 
ground, — in short, that very various side factors 
suggest an erroneous judgment as to the number 
of the perceived things. And yet such harmless 
experimental tests unveil all the factors with 
which, for instance, political parties before elec- 
tion awake misleading suggestions as to the rel- 
ative strength of the party vote. A little bit of 
bright colour on my laboratory table gives me all 
the moral effect on my subjects which the most 
wonderful torchlight processions and brass bands 
can have on the suggestive voter. 

Or take a still more striking experiment. We 
have a series of cardboard boxes of different sizes, 
from a width of a few inches to several feet, and 
[185] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
we make them all exactly equal in weight, filling 
the smallest, perhaps, with iron and the largest 
with straw. All are to have the same handle, and 
if one after the other is lifted with closed eyes, all 
of course appear of equal heaviness. But now the 
subject is to lift them, one after the other, with 
open eyes, and the impression of weight will at 
once be controlled by the suggestion given by the 
size. The small box appears now several times 
heavier than the large one, and no effort to over- 
come the suggestion can rule out the illusion. It 
may be a long way from the overestimation of the 
weight of a little cardboard box to the falsifying 
overestimation of a piece of evidence by the jury 
of a murder case, but it is a straight way without 
demarcation lines. If the twelve jurymen were 
grouped according to their suggestibility, from 
the most stubborn to the most easily influenced, 
they would stand probably in the same order as if 
they were tested for errors in the judgment of 
our boxes of cardboard. Yes, we might simplify 
our test still more. Sometimes I found it sufficient 
to show to my subjects various pairs of circles 
drawn on paper ; they had to decide which of the 
[186] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 

pairs was the larger. The pairs were always of the 
same size, but in their centres various figures were 
printed ; the suggestible person is easily inclined to 
call the circle with the figure 79 larger than the 
circle which contains merely the figure 32, just as 
there may be men who think the prettier girl to be 
the cleverer, or the richer fellow the more bril- 
liant. 

What does the psychologist really understand 
by a suggestion ? Let us be sure from the first that 
it certainly means nothing abnormal or patholog- 
ical. The illustrations have indicated sufficiently 
that abnormal disturbance and ordinary normal 
life can meet here. My lady with the over-gen- 
erous last will had certainly left the realm of 
normality ; the voter who is imposed on by the big 
parade, or the customer who is carried away by 
the bargain prices of the great removal sale, is 
also under the influence of suggestion and may 
yet be otherwise quite a normal person. Sugges- 
tion is, moreover, no symptom of weakness, and it 
would be absurd to believe that life might be 
wholesomer and better if it could move on without 
the aid of influences of suggestion. On the con- 
[187] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
trary, life would be dreary and commonplace, 
without enthusiasm and without convictions, if all 
suggestions evaporated. Education and art, pol- 
itics and religion, rely on the power of suggestion, 
for a suggestion is after all any idea which takes 
hold of our consciousness in such a way that it in- 
hibits and excludes the opposite ideas. 

But in what sense is there any meaning in 
speaking of opposite ideas? Our consciousness 
has room for any combination of thoughts, and 
each idea seems to go peacefully together with 
any other idea. We can think black and white and 
summer and winter and man and woman quietly 
together. When the psychologist speaks of op- 
posite ideas, he means something very different. 
He calls opposite such ideas as involve mutually 
exclusive attitudes. I can think of man and of 
woman, but I cannot take the attitude towards 
a person of taking him for a man and at the same 
time the attitude of taking him for a woman. I 
can think of summer and winter, but I must be- 
lieve that the season is either winter or summer, 
not both, and must act accordingly. The whole 
antagonism thus lies in our own activities, and, 
[188] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
if we say that one idea excludes the opposite, we 
really mean that the idea which demands one atti- 
tude excludes another idea which demands an op- 
posite attitude. In ordinary life, in states free 
from suggestion, no idea has any prerogative. 
Each has fair play. When a new idea comes to our 
mind, perhaps from hearing it from a friend, per- 
haps from reading it, perhaps from our own 
imagination, it may fall into a conflict of atti- 
tudes with some other idea present and, above all, 
with some associations and memories which awake ; 
then begins a fair fight in which either the new- 
comer or the old idea may win ; both together can- 
not last, as we cannot live through opposite ac- 
tions at the same time: we cannot turn to the 
right and to the left, we cannot close the hand 
and open it, we cannot speak and be silent. 

Wrong ideas and inappropriate propositions 
enter our consciousness through many doors all 
the time, but they are at once eliminated through 
the influence of the opposite ideas which a faith- 
ful memory and a sound reasoning provide. That 
which is connected most firmly with the remainder 
of our experience will survive. Each of the rival- 
[189] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
ling ideas is thus backed by its own connections 
and stands on its own merits. Whenever this is 
changed, and an idea, it may be the new intruder 
or the old incumbent, gets an unfair chance so 
that all its opposing ideas are weakened and per- 
haps even suppressed from the start, then we call 
it a suggestion. All our prejudices and all our 
convictions work as such suggestions. They do 
not give to the idea of opposite attitude the op- 
portunity for a test. That may work for the good 
or for the bad. The moral idea and the vicious 
desire may be equally strengthened through such 
suggestive energy which eliminates the opposite 
from the start. We call the readiness to receive 
such suggestions from other persons suggestibil- 
ity. The degree of suggestibility changes from 
man to man and changes in every individual from 
mood to mood, from hour to hour. Hypnotism, 
finally, is an artificially increased state of sug- 
gestibility. Yet there are nowhere sharp demarca- 
tion lines. Even the most stubborn mind is open 
to certain suggestions and even the most deeply 
hypnotised mind has still the power to resist cer- 
tain ideas which would be opposed by the deepest 
[190] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
maxims of his life. Emotion certainly increases 
suggestibility with everybody ; so does fatigue and 
nervous exhaustion. 

There is nothing mysterious in all this, and the 
psychologist is not unable to understand it all as 
product of the brain mechanism. He knows to-day 
that each idea is composed of sensations which ac- 
company nervous excitement in many sensorial 
brain cells and these are stimulated by the sense 
organs. But he knows further that this excite- 
ment does not stop in those sensory cells. The 
process which starts from the sense organs does 
not find in those sensory brain centres an end sta- 
tion, but runs on into motor paths which lead, 
finally, to the muscular system. Those central 
brain stations thus serve for the transmission of 
the incoming sensory stimuli into outgoing motor 
impulses. All this is endlessly complex. Millions 
of paths lead to the brain and millions of paths 
lead out again, and the cortex of the brain is the 
great automatic switch-board for all those tracks. 
Yet all this alone would be no explanation. It 
would make us only understand that any sensory 
idea, a word which we hear, a thing which we see, 
[191] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
would necessarily lead over into an action. But 
plenty of facts speak now in favour of the fol- 
lowing view. 

Firstly, those motor paths in the brain are so 
related to each other that whenever excitement 
goes on in the one, the track which would lead to 
the opposite action becomes blocked. When the 
impulse runs into those nerves which, for instance, 
open the hand, the brain closes those channels of 
motor discharge which would lead us to clench the 
fist. Secondly, the ideas which accompany the sen- 
sory brain processes become vivid only when the 
channels of discharge are open; they remain un- 
vivid, that is, they become inhibited and sup- 
pressed when those channels of discharge are 
closed. A suggestion would thus be an idea whose 
sensory brain accompaniment keeps the channels 
of motor discharge wide open, so that the paths 
which would lead to the opposite action are, on 
the whole, closed ; and because the channels of dis- 
charge are closed, all the ideas which might lead 
to such opposite action are eliminated from the 
first. If the words, " This is a garden," spoken 
to me here in my library, came as a suggestion, 
[192] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
they would not exclude any activity of mine. I 
might carry on a conversation on politics, might 
read a book, and might remember correctly all 
that happened to me before, but everything must 
remain in harmony with my attitude towards this 
room as a garden. The wish to take a book from 
the shelf on the wall would be indeed inhibited and 
the books themselves would become correspond- 
ingly invisible, while I should believe I saw the 
flowers in the garden, which I should feel ready to 
pick. Of course, to take my library shelves for 
flower bushes because someone tells me this is a 
garden demands an extreme degree of suggestibil- 
ity, and, where it is reached, we should certainly 
speak of an hypnotic state. To take in an anxious 
mood at twilight the trunk of a willow tree for a 
burglar requires much less suggestibility; and to 
believe the latest news of the yellow journal only 
because it is shouted in big headlines, in spite of 
the fact that a hundred earlier experiences ought 
to suppress belief, a still smaller degree of sug- 
gestibility is sufficient. 

If, therefore, no mystery and no disease is in- 
volved, if suggestion rests on an opening and 
[193] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
closing of motor channels which goes on auto- 
matically and to a high degree independent of 
conscious will, if everyone is open to suggestions 
and yet suggestions are able to turn white into 
black and black into white, it seems indeed aston- 
ishing that the work of justice is carried out in the 
courts without ever consulting the psychologist 
and asking him for all the aid which the modern 
study of suggestion can offer. There is no one 
participant in the drama of the court who might 
not change the plot by the operation of sugges- 
tions in his mind : the defendant may have worked 
under suggestion at the time of his criminal deed, 
the witnesses may be influenced during their ob- 
servation of the deed or may labour under sugges- 
tion on the witness stand and, even if their observa- 
tion and recollection is correct, their narration may 
still be tainted by the strange spell ; but is the law- 
yer or the judge, above all, is the juryman less open 
to a disturbance of the normal ideational rivalry? 
To be sure, popular imagination runs often 
enough into the suspicion that a crime was per- 
formed under hypnotic influence; but just this is 
on the whole more a motive for dime novels than 
[194] 






SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
for legal consideration. All the probabilities are 
against it. For the purpose of justice it is far 
more important to keep in mind that hypnotism is 
only the strongest degree of suggestibility and 
that the weaker states of openness for suggestion 
are the real hotbeds of criminal impulses. We 
know to-day, for instance, that alcohol poisoning 
can produce with many persons a state of sug- 
gestibility in which complete imitations of post- 
hypnotic suggestions become possible. The order 
to do a certain foolish act at an appointed hour in 
the sober state will be carried out when the order 
has been given in an impressive way while the wine 
was still paralysing the inhibitory centres. In the 
same way emotion changes the man ; during a 
panic the suggestibility is reinforced to a degree 
where all resistances seem to be broken down, and 
to be a member of a crowd is always sufficient to 
weaken the counter action. But there are many 
persons whose unusual suggestibility makes them 
constantly liable to chance influences, even in 
normal social life. They are enthusiastic for the 
last arguments they hear, and the next speaker who 
says the opposite convinces them just as fully. 
[195] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
The psychological experiment can measure the de- 
gree of this constitutional weakness with exacti- 
tude, and to leave this nervous disposition alto- 
gether out of account in judging the criminal act 
is in principle not different from punishing the in- 
sane like a normal man. 

Still more important than the influence of sug- 
gestion on the crime is that on the report of the 
witness. The distortion may begin with the mere 
perception of the circumstances. Whenever the 
court becomes doubtful as to whether the witness 
really observed the facts correctly, we hear some 
speculative generality as to the probability of a 
reliable judgment. Here again the first thing 
ought to be to find the personal equation and to 
determine by the means of science to what degree 
the perceptive consciousness of the observer re- 
mains independent of intruding suggestions. The 
suggestible witness may have heard distinct words 
where the objective witness heard only a noise. 
Much may depend upon that for the trial. Words 
distinguished by the unsuggestible mind would 
count for much; those distinguished by the sug- 
gestible one for almost nothing. But to say which 
[196] 






SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
is which, it ought not to be sufficient to rely on 
hearsay and anecdotes, with all the means of the 
laboratory experts at disposal to determine the 
exact degree of suggestibility, just as experts 
would decide whether a bullet can have taken the 
one way or the other through the body. 

Where the perception was fairly correct, the 
recollection may be entirely distorted by sugges- 
tive side influences. We have spoken of the ex- 
periments which prove the powerful influence of 
suggestive questions. No doubt the whole situa- 
tion of the court-room reinforces the suggestibil- 
ity of every witness. In much-discussed cases cur- 
rent rumours, and especially the newspapers, have 
their full share in distorting the real recollections. 
Everything becomes unintentionally shaped and 
moulded. The imaginative idea which fits a prej- 
udice, a theory, a suspicion, meets at first the 
opposition of memory, but slowly it wins in power, 
and as soon as the suggestibility is increased, the 
play of ideas under equal conditions ends, and the 
opposing idea is annihilated. Easy tests could 
quickly unveil this changed frame of mind and, if 
such a half hypnotic state of suggestibility has 
[197] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
set In, it is no wiser to keep the witness on the 
stand than if he had emptied a bottle of whiskey 
in the meantime. And even if the memory itself 
is correct, the narration may be dictated by sug- 
gestive influences and the reported story itself 
may work backwards with auto-suggestive in- 
fluence on the memory. There are not a few who 
finally believe their hunting stories after they 
have told them repeatedly. 

Is it necessary to say that the most suggestible 
man in the court and the one whose suggestibility 
is most dangerous may be neither the criminal nor 
the witness, but the juryman? His task demands 
freedom from suggestion more than almost any 
other quality. He has to weigh the value of con- 
flicting evidence. Here again psychological ex- 
periment can show how easy it is to interfere with 
the unhampered play of rival ideas when the mind 
is suggestible. The lawyer who knows his average 
juryman instinctively makes the richest use of all 
the psychological factors which bring the argu- 
ments of the one side fully into the focus of in- 
terest and suppress and inhibit the effectiveness of 
the opposite idea. But here again there may be a 
[198] 



SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
degree of suggestibility which simply interferes 
with the purpose of justice and only psychological 
experiment can bring such deficiency to light. The 
judgment of a jury becomes a caricature, if not 
the evidence, but insignificant and accidental cir- 
cumstances determine the attitude of the sugges- 
tible juror. 

Of course public opinion with its crowd of in- 
stincts is for the most part just such a suggesti- 
ble arbiter. I heard at the centre of politics that 
after the Spanish War, when the nation was de- 
lighted with the navy and all kinds of scandals 
seemed to bring evidence against the army, Con- 
gress would never have voted so much to the army 
had not West Point in that year won the football 
match over Annapolis, and thus swung round the 
suggestible public opinion from navy to army. 
But, to be sure, when the Court of public opinion 
begins to weigh the evidence, it is no longer law, 
but politics, and it might not be wise to ask how 
far there is suggestion in politics too, inasmuch 
as we might be checked too soon by the counter 
question: Is there anything in politics which is 
not suggestion? 

[199] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 

Those stubborn people who simply did not believe 
that such a thing as hypnotism existed have prob- 
ably now slowly died out ; they might just as well 
have refused to believe that there are mental 
diseases. And those of the other extreme, those 
who saw in the hypnotic state a mystical revela- 
tion in which superhuman powers manifested them- 
selves, have slowly lost their ground now; they 
might just as well call sleep or hysteria or epilepsy 
a supernatural mystery. No, science understands 
to-day that the facts of hypnotism are in no way 
more mysterious than all the other functions in the 
natural life of the mind. They are narrowly related 
to the experiences of absorbing attention, vivid 
imagination and obedient will and, on the other 
side, to sleep and dreams and mental aberration. 

Of course, there nevertheless still remains much 
under heated discussion. There is no real agree- 
ment yet as to where the limits of hypnotism lie 
and where it shades off into suggestion. There are 
[203] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
various possible interpretations of the hypnotic 
brain process, various views also as to the special 
disposition for it, and even its symptoms still need 
careful inquiry. But everyone may agree at least 
in this : that hypnotism is not without serious con- 
sequences and is therefore certainly not a play- 
thing. And secondly: that hypnotism is for many 
nervous and mental disorders a highly effective 
remedy when applied by the experienced physi- 
cian. It has brought and will bring health and 
through it, happiness to uncounted sufferers, and 
therefore it has come to stay. 

But if hypnotism is to be with us it seems nat- 
ural that the question should be asked — often not 
without anxiety : — What is its relation to law and 
court, to crime and criminal procedure? The un- 
canny power which man has therein over men, will 
over will, suggests the thought that dangerous 
social entanglements may threaten or that new 
energies in the interest of the law may be made 
thereby available. The imagination has here a free 
field ; the dime novel and, alas ! the dollar-and-a-half 
novel have made full use of this convenient instru- 
ment of criminal wonders, and the newspaper pub- 
[204] 






HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
lie reads, often without any feeling for the dif- 
ference, stories of hypnotic crime which might 
easily have taken place by the side of others which 
are absolutely impossible. There is nowhere a 
standard, and it may therefore be worth while to 
take a bird's-eye-view of the whole field in which 
hypnotism and crime come really or supposedly in 
contact with each other. 

The popular imagination turns first with pref- 
erence to the query whether the court may not ap- 
ply hypnotism for the purpose of unveiling the 
hidden truth. Unsolicited letters concerning hyp- 
notism turn up copiously in a psychologist's mail ; 
statistics show that it is just this proposition 
which disturbs the largest percentage of these 
amateur criminologists. They take a passionate 
interest in every murder case and too often reach 
the torturing stage of not knowing who is really 
guilty, even when all evidence and the verdict of 
the jury is in. Their scruple, they feel, could be 
removed only by their absolutely knowing that 
this or that man speaks the truth. Hypnotism 
has the well-known power of breaking down the 
resistance of the will; if the hypnotised witness 
[205 ] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
were ordered to speak the full truth, he would no 
longer have any choice. It looks so simple and 
promising. 

From a purely psychological standpoint such a 
method might be successful. It is not different in 
principle from the hypnotic confessions which a 
patient may make against his will. The other day 
a student whom I was curing of the cocaine habit 
assured me most vehemently that he had no cocaine 
in his room any more, and a few minutes later, when 
I had hypnotised him, he described correctly the 
place where he had hidden it. But the difficulty 
would begin with the fact, too often misunder- 
stood, that one cannot be hypnotised by a new per- 
son for the first time against his will. A criminal 
who does not confess in his full senses will not 
yield to any hypnotising efforts, as no outsider 
can bring about the new state of mind. Hypnotis- 
ation cannot work on an unyielding brain as a 
sponge with chloroform which is held by force to 
the mouth might work. If the imagination of the 
subject does not help in reaching the somnam- 
bulic state, no one can inject a mesmeric fluid into 
his veins. And finally, even if such hypnotising by 
[206] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
force were possible, it is self evident, from moral 
and legal reasons, that no civilised court ought to 
listen to such extorted evidence. 

Of course, it might be different if a wrongly 
accused defendant or a suspected witness wished 
in his own interest to be hypnotised. A woman 
once asked my advice in such a case. She 
was under a cloud of ugly suspicion ; even her own 
husband did not believe her protestations of in- 
nocence, and, I suppose, her lawyer still less. She 
wanted to be brought to the deepest state of hyp- 
notism in open court till it would be evident that 
she had no will-power left for deceit. If she de- 
clared herself innocent on the question of the 
hypnotiser, the court would have to accept it. I 
advised her strongly not even to suggest such a 
theatrical performance. Technically, it is not at 
all possible to hypnotise everyone to such a strong 
degree, further it would be difficult to prove to 
the court that she did not simulate hypnotic sleep 
and that no secret agreement existed between the 
subject and her hypnotiser. But the decisive point 
for me was the conviction that the court ought to 
accept such somnambulic utterances as little as the 
[207] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
insane speeches of a paranoiac. She would be no 
longer in full possession of her mental energies, as 
it is the essence of the hypnotic state that large 
parts of the inner functions are inhibited: all is 
suppressed which counteracts the suggestions of 
the hypnotiser. She thus would cease to be really 
herself, and the person on the witness stand would 
therefore not remain legally the witness who took 
the oath before the hypnotisation. 

Quite different is the case when the hypnotisa- 
tion is required to awake in the mind the memory 
of facts which occurred in an earlier hypnotic sit- 
ting. It is well known, indeed, that a person awak- 
ing from hypnosis may be without any memory of 
the words spoken, but may remember everything, 
even months after, as soon as a new hypnotic 
state is produced. Such a sharpened dream mem- 
ory may become important, and here the break of 
personal unity is no hindrance, as the purpose is 
objective information; for such an end even an 
insane man may give acceptable evidence, perhaps 
as to the place where stolen booty is hidden. 

But that the court should hypnotise would in 
any case be a most exceptional event; what is de- 
[208] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
serving of much more attention is the case when 
the criminal hypnotises. Here again popular mis- 
understandings prevail. Here belongs, first of 
all, the absurd fear of the man with paralysing 
powers. He enters the room and when he looks on 
you, you are powerless; you give him your jewels 
and the key to your safe and he plunders you 
gently while you have to smile and cannot raise a 
hand, The English newspapers insisted that such 
a " burglar with the hypnotic eye " is " the latest 
product of America." Punch, the London Chari- 
vari, poked fun at him with a long poem on John 
P. Beck of Fortieth Street — Was as smart a 
burglar as one could meet. " On one thing only 
would he rely — The power of his black hypnotic 
eye." At first John P. burglarises the halls of the 
millionaires. Finally he comes before the jury, but 
every witness begins to talk nonsense as soon as 
John P. looks at him. " And each who came 
through the witness door — Seemed still more mad 
than the man before." And at last he looks on the 
judge, and the judge, too, begins to get confused 
and absurd and closes finally : " I know the crim- 
inal. Yes, you see — The wretch before you. I am 
[209] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
he ! — The man who should be In the dock is me ! — 
Arrest me, warders ! Step down, John P." 

Now all this is, of course, extremely funny, but 
Punch wanted to be still funnier, and therefore in- 
troduced, with a serious face, the burlesque poetry 
with a prose remark. It closes with the statement: 
" Professor Munsterberg of Harvard and other 
learned men have set themselves to show that hyp- 
notic power may become a most dangerous asset 
of the criminal." That is amusing, indeed — be- 
cause hardly anyone who is interested in the psy- 
chology of hypnotic states has sought and used so 
constantly the chance to ridicule the belief in a 
special " hypnotic power." I know well that not a 
few disagree with me in this, but I must insist 
and have always insisted that anyone can hyp- 
notise anyone. 

Of course, whoever wants to hypnotise — in fact, 
no one but a physician ought to do it — must learn 
the technique and apply it patiently and skilfully. 
And certainly there are individual differences. Not 
everyone can be deeply hypnotised ; with not a few 
the inhibition does not go further than the in- 
ability to open the eyes, while only one of 
[210] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
four enters into strong hypnotic hallucinations. 
Further, not everyone is well prepared to awake 
that confidence which is essential and that feeling 
of repose which guides one over to the dreamy 
state; the look, the voice, the gestures, the phrases, 
the behaviour of certain persons make them poor 
hypnotisers, however well they may understand the 
tricks, But in principle everyone can hypnotise 
and can be hypnotised, just as in principle every- 
one can love and can be loved and no especial mys- 
terious power is needed to fall in love or to awake 
love. 

Yet, while thus everyone can exert hypnotic in- 
fluence, no one can do it by a mere glance. All the 
stories of a secret influence by which one man's 
will gets hold of another man's mind are re- 
mainders of the mesmeric theories of the past. We 
know to-day that everything depends upon the at- 
tention and imagination of the hypnotised and 
that no mysterious fluid can flow over. This mys- 
tical view of unscientific superstition reached its 
climax in the prevalent belief that a man can exert 
such a secret influence from a far distance, with- 
out the victim's knowledge of the source of the 
[211] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
uncanny distortion of his mind. Thus every 
heinous crime can be committed under that cover. 
The distant hypnotiser can inflict pain and suf- 
fering on his enemy and can misuse the innocent 
as instrument of his criminal schemes. . 

Such a reappearance of the old witchcraft 
superstitions is especially characteristic for the 
borderland cases between normal and abnormal 
minds. An unsound intellect easily interprets the 
stray impulses of the mind as the intrusion of a 
distant adversary. In Germany, for instance, a 
talented writer bombarded the legislatures with 
his pamphlets demanding new laws for the pun- 
ishment of those who produced criminal perver- 
sions through telepathic influence. The asylums 
are full of such ideas. The paranoiacs are always 
inclined to explain their inner disturbances by the 
newest startling agencies. Their mind is disturbed 
by Roentgen rays or wireless telegraphy or hyp- 
notic influence from a distance. In this country 
such accusations have become familiar to the stu- 
dents of Christian Science. In " Science and 
Health " Mrs. Eddy wrote, " In coming years the 
person or mind that hates his neighbour will have 
[212] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
no need to traverse his fields, to destroy his flocks 
and herds . . . for the evil mind will do this 
through mesmerism ; and not in propria persona 
be seen committing the deed." And again, " Mes- 
merism is practised both with and without manipu- 
lation; but the evil deed without a sign is also 
done by the manipulator and mental mal-practi- 
tioner. The secret mental assassin stalks abroad 
and needs to be branded to be known in what he is 
doing." Or, " That malicious animal-power seeks 
to kill his fellow mortals, morally and physi- 
cally, and then to charge the innocent with his 
crimes." 

There ought to be no compromise : that morally 
ruinous doctrine of " Malicious Animal Magnet- 
ism " is a complete distortion of the facts. Noth- 
ing of that kind is ever possible. Some agree that 
if the surprising facts of hypnotism are possible, 
such telepathic mesmerism might be possible too, 
as the influence looks similar. We might just as 
well propose : if the surprising fact is true that a 
hen can be hatched from a hen's egg, it may also 
be true that a hen can come from a white candy 
egg, as they look alike. It is exactly the essentials 
[213] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
of hypnotism and telepathy which are dissimilar 
and not to be compared : the latter would be a mys- 
tery, the former is no harder to explain than any 
act of sense impression and attention. 

Of course, there is no reason to deny that a 
person may fall into hypnotic state while the hyp- 
notiser is at another place. The only condition is, 
that he must have been hypnotised by him before 
and that his own imagination has been captured 
by the thought of the absent hypnotiser. I my- 
self have repeatedly hypnotised by telephone or 
even by mail. I treated, for instance, a morphin- 
ist who at first came daily to my laboratory to be 
hypnotised ; later it was sufficient to tell him over 
the telephone: Take your watch out, in two min- 
utes you will fall asleep; or to write to him: As 
soon as you have read this note, you will be in 
the hypnotic state. I thus had the " malicious " 
influence over a distance, but it was not by will 
power, it was the power of his own imagination; 
at the time when he read my note in his suburb 
and fell asleep, I was not thinking of him at all. 
As a matter of course, such influences by cor- 
respondence would have been impossible had not 
[214] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
repeated hypnotisation in personal contact pre- 
ceded. Even that may not be necessary if not com- 
plete hypnotisation but only suggestive influence 
is in question. A few days ago I got a letter from 
a Southern lady whose son suffers from morphin- 
ism. I have never seen either of them. She writes : 
" My son has been impressed with the belief that 
your treatment is all he needs to be cured. In a 
dream, he said, you stood before him with the 
finger-tips of your hands trembling and said: I 
have the power to influence your will. He woke 
repeating: You have the power to control my 
will. That morning he seemed to forget to take 
the morphine at the regular time and soon went 
down to the beach without his morphine outfit in 
his pocket — an unusual thing," and so forth. 
He himself was convinced that my will power was 
working on him while I did not even know him. 

The chief factor is confidence. Anyone who saw 
the hypnotic effects, when the greatest master of 
hypnotism, Professor Bernheim of Nancy, in 
France, went from bed to bed in the clinics sim- 
ply saying: Sleep, sleep, felt that indeed no one 
else could have attained that influence. But not 
[215] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
because he had a special power: the chief point 
was that the whole population about Nancy went 
to him with an exaggerated tension of expectancy 
and confidence. I remember the case of a suffering 
woman whom I tried at first in vain to hypnotise; 
I felt that her mind was full of antagonism. I 
slowly found out what troubled her. She had seen 
so many physicians who had sent her high bills 
that she was afraid doctors humbug nervous pa- 
tients for money. I told her that I, as a psychol- 
ogist, do such work only in the interest of science, 
and that I, therefore, as a matter of course, have 
never accepted a cent from any patient anywhere. 
Two minutes later she was in deep hypnotic sleep. 
The attention and emotion of the subject is 
thus much more important than the power of the 
hypnotiser. Yet, this does not exclude the possi- 
bility that attention and emotion may be stirred 
up intentionally, perhaps even maliciously, with- 
out conscious knowledge of the victim. There is 
no especial power which produces love, and yet the 
coquettish smile of a wilful girl may perturb the 
peace of any man. In this way a hypnotiser may 
not wait till the subject lies down with the con- 
[216] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
scious expectation of being hypnotised, but may 
work slowly and systematically by means of a 
hundred little tricks on the imagination of a sus- 
ceptible person. While both the hypnotic eye 
which fascinates at the first glance and the ma- 
licious magnetism from a distance are absurd in- 
ventions, such slow and persistent gaining of 
power over an unresisting mind is certainly possi- 
ble. A full hypnotic state cannot be reached in 
such a way; it shades off into the states of sub- 
mission which belong to our normal social life; 
there is increased suggestibility in love and fear, 
in the pupil's feeling towards the teacher and the 
patient's feeling towards the physician — nowhere 
a sharp demarcation line between these most valu- 
able influences of social authority and the ab- 
normal suggestions which have their climax in 
the complete hypnotic state. Such semi-hypnotic 
state can work, of course, also for good, but the 
dangers of its misuse are evident. 

I remember the tragic case of a young Western 

woman who seems to have lived for years such a 

depersonalised social life. She had gone through 

college and graduate university work and every 

[217] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
one of her instructors and comrades was charmed 
with the lovely girl; but her finest gifts showed 
themselves in her delightful family life. Her aged 
mother and her sisters were her only thoughts. 
The family made the acquaintance of an Italian 
who posed as a rich Italian count. He was without 
means, without education, disreputable and man- 
nerless, from the lowest level. The girl was dis- 
gusted with him, but he managed to see her often. 
She felt with aversion how his influence grew on 
her; she felt a shiver when he looked at her, and 
yet an uncanny sensation crept over her, a 
strange fascination which she could not overcome ; 
she had to do what he asked and finally what he 
ordered her to do. She despised him, and yet one 
day they secretly left the house and were married. 
At once he took possession of the young woman's 
considerable property. But it was not only that 
she gave him all ; under his control she began ab- 
surd lawsuits to deprive the family of all they 
owned; she swore on the witness stand in court to 
the most cruel accusations and attacks against her 
mother, who had never wavered in her devoted love 
for her daughter, and everyone who knew her be- 
[218] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
fore felt from her expression and her voice that 
she was not herself any more, but that she was the 
passive instrument of an unscrupulous schemer. 
Her own mother said : " Sometimes, for a few 
minutes, I seemed to get near her — then she would 
seem gone, miles and miles away. There are no 
words to describe the horror of it." And the sister 
wrote : " I should go crazy if I saw her often." 
And such a weird spectacle of an elusive mind, 
which is the old personality and yet not the old 
self, is not quite rare in our court rooms. It is 
a hypnotic state which is pregnant with social 
dangers, but certainly, as said before, there is no 
fear that it can be brought about suddenly or 
from a distance; it needs persistent influence, 
works probably only on neurotic persons with a 
special disposition for mental inhibitions, and 
never reaches complete hypnotism. 

How far now does the full hypnotic state itself 
fall within the realm of criminal action? One 
aspect offers itself at once : the hypnotised person 
may become the powerless instrument of the crim- 
inal will of the hypnotiser. He may press the trig- 
ger of the gun, may mix the poison into the food, 
[219] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

may steal and forge, and yet the real responsible 
actor is not the one who commits the crime but 
the other one who is protected and who directed 
the deed by hypnotic suggestion. All that has 
been demonstrated by experiments a hundred 
times. I perhaps tell the hypnotised man that he is 
to give poison to the visitor whom I shall call from 
the next room. I have a sugar powder prepared 
and assure my man that the powder is arsenic. I 
throw it into a glass of water before his eyes and 
then I call the friend from the next room. The 
hypnotised subject takes the glass and offers it to 
the newcomer; you see how he hesitates and per- 
haps trembles, but finally he overcomes his re- 
sistance and offers the sugar water which he must 
take for poison. The possibilities of such secret 
crimes seem to grow, moreover, in an almost un- 
limited way through the so-called posthypnotic 
suggestions. The opportunity to perform unwill- 
ingly a crime in the hypnotic sleep itself is in 
practical life, of course, small and exceptional. 
But the hypnotiser can give the order to carry out 
the act at a later time, a few hours or a few days 
after awaking. 

[220] 






HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
Every experimenter knows that he can make the 
subject go through a foolish performance long 
after the hypnosis ended. Go this afternoon at 
four to your friend, stand before him on one leg 
and repeat the alphabet. Such a silly order will 
be carried out to the letter, and only the theoretical 
question is open, whether the act is done in spite 
of full consciousness, or whether the subject falls 
again under the influence of his own imagination 
at the suggested time into a half hypnotic state. 
Certainly he does not know before four o'clock 
that he is expected to do the act, and when the 
clock strikes four he feels an instinctive desire to 
run to the house of his friend and to behave as 
demanded. He will even do it with the feeling of 
freedom and will associate in his own mind illogical 
motives to explain to his own satisfaction his per- 
verse desires. He wants to recite the alphabet to 
his friend because his friend once made a mistake 
in spelling. Might he not just as well run to his 
friend's house and shoot him down if a criminal 
hypnotiser afflicted him with such a murderous 
suggestion? He would again believe himself to act 
in freedom and would invent a motive. The situa- 
[ 221] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
tion becomes the more gruesome, as the criminal 
would have only half done his work in omitting to 
add the further suggestion that no one else would 
ever be able to hypnotise him again and that he 
would entirely forget that he was ever hypnotised. 
Experiment proves that all this is entirely possible, 
and that posthypnotic suggestion thus plays in 
literature a convenient role of secret agency for 
atrocious murder as well as for Trilby's wonder- 
ful singing. 

In contradiction to all this I have to confess: I 
have my doubts as to the purity of Trilby's hyp- 
notic singing, and I have more than doubts — yes, 
I feel practically sure that no real murder has 
ever been committed by an innocent man under the 
influence of posthypnotic suggestion. It is true, I 
have seen men killing with paper daggers and 
poisoning with white flour and shooting with 
empty revolvers in the libraries of nerve specialists 
or in laboratory rooms with doctors sitting by and 
watching the performance. But I have never be- 
come convinced that there did not remain a back- 
ground idea of artificiality in the mind of the hyp- 
notised, and that this idea overcame the resistance 
[222] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
which would be prohibitive in actual life. To bring 
an absolute proof of this conviction is hardly pos- 
sible, as we cannot really kill for experiment's 
sake. 

There remains, of course, also the possible 
claim that the courts have condemned men for 
murder for which they were passive instruments. 
Yet, it is a fact that so far no murder case is 
known in which the not unusual theory of the 
hypnotic influence seemed probable after all evi- 
dence was in. I have repeatedly received inquiries 
from lawyers asking whether there would be any 
basis to stand on if the defence were to claim that 
the crime was done in a hypnotic or posthypnotic 
state. I have replied every time that, in spite of 
the many experiments which seem to prove the 
contrary, it can be said that hypnotic suggestion 
is unable to break down the inner resistance. 
There is therefore no danger to be feared from 
this side. The frequent claim of defendants that 
they must have been hypnotised is, nevertheless, 
mostly no conscious invention. It is rather the 
outcome of the fact that the criminal impulse 
comes to the unbalanced diseased mind often like 
[223] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
a foreign intruder; it takes hold of the person- 
ality without free choice of motives, and the un- 
fortunate sufferer thus interprets quite sincerely 
his unaccountable perversions as the result of 
strange outside influences. 

But there is another side, and it would be reck- 
less to overlook the difference. You cannot make 
an honest man steal and kill, but you can make him 
perform many other actions which are not immoral 
as far as the action is concerned and which yet 
have criminal character. The scoundrel perhaps 
gives the posthypnotic suggestion that his sub- 
ject, a man of independent means and without 
immediate relatives, call at a lawyer's and deposit 
with him a last will leaving all his property to the 
hypnotiser. Here no resistance from moral prin- 
ciple is involved; the man who throws away all he 
owns acts in accordance with the order because 
the impulse is not checked by the habits of a 
trained conscience. We can add one more step 
which is entirely possible: the hypnotiser may see 
a further opportunity to give the posthypnotic 
suggestion of suicide. The next day the victim is 
found dead in his room ; everything indicates that 
[224] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
he took his own life; there is not the least sus- 
picion: and the hypnotiser is his heir in conse- 
quence of the spurious last will. Similar cases are 
reported, and they are not improbable. The easi- 
ness with which any hypnotiser can cover the 
traces of his crime by special suggestions makes 
the situation the more dangerous. 

In this group belong also the posthypnotic per- 
juries. Of course, if the man on the witness stand 
knew that he swore falsely, his moral convictions 
would rebel as in the case of the theft and murder. 
But he believes what he swears ; on his side there is 
no crime, but merely confusion of ideas and falsi- 
fied memory ; the crime belongs entirely to the one 
who fabricated the artificial delusion. 

In many of these cases the hypnotised subject is 
the sufferer while he himself is acting; they are 
not seldom supplemented by crimes in which the 
subject is a passive sufferer. The French litera- 
ture of hypnotism is full of cases in which hyp- 
notised women have been the victims of sexual 
crime. No warning can be loud enough, indeed, 
against hypnotising by anyone but reliable doc- 
tors of medicine. Other cases refer to simple 
[225 ] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
fraud. The posthypnotic suggestion may force 
one man to pay the price of real pearls for glass 
pearls and may induce another man to buy a 
house which is useless for him. The physician who 
is a trained psychologist will have no difficulty in 
assisting the court in all such situations and in 
making the right diagnosis ; on the other hand, 
without thorough experience in scientific psychol- 
ogy, no one will be able to disentangle such cases, 
be he physician or not. The hypnotiser may have 
suggested complete forgetfulness and may have 
prohibited any new hypnotisation, but there al- 
ways remains somewhere a little opening where the 
psychologist can insert a wedge and finally break 
open the whole mental structure. It may be added 
at once that the psychologist has also no difficulty 
in recognising any simulation of hypnotic states. 
There remains still one important relation be- 
tween hypnotism and crime: hypnotisation may 
prevent crime. The moral interest we take in the 
suppression of criminal impulses makes us inclined 
to see a sharp demarcation line between these 
socially destructive tendencies and other impulses 
which are morally indifferent. Psychologically we 
[226] 



HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
cannot acknowledge such a distinct line between 
them. The craving for an immoral and illegal end 
may take possession of a weak nervous system in 
the same way in which any neurasthenic impulse 
becomes rooted, and it seems therefore not unjusti- 
fied to hope for such a criminal disposition the 
same relief by hypnotic treatment as for the neu- 
rasthenic disturbance. 

Last year I was approached within the same 
week by two young people who complained in al- 
most identical terms that they could not master 
their ideas and desires. The one suffered from the 
idea that he wanted to kill certain persons ; when- 
ever he saw them he felt the impulse to knock them 
down. The other suffered from the idea that she 
wanted to look alternatingly from one eye to the 
other of any person with whom she talked. The 
impulse to kill was possibly of the greatest conse- 
quence, the impulse to look from eye to eye was 
evidently the most indifferent affair. And yet the 
second person was the greater sufferer. She had 
once by chance observed in a man's face a strik- 
ing difference in colour between his two eyes, and 
that led her to look alternatingly to the one and 
[227] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
the other eye. It became a habit which grew 
stronger than her will and, when she came to me, 
it had reached a point where she thought of suicide 
because life had become intolerable from this in- 
cessant impulse to swing from eye to eye. I treated 
the dangerous killing impulse and the harmless 
swinging impulse exactly alike, by inhibitory sug- 
gestions, and they disappeared under the hypnotic 
treatment in exactly the same time. 

But it is evident that the criminal impulses can- 
not be simply treated as an appendix to the neu- 
rasthenic states. Most complex and partly moral 
questions are involved therein. Have we a right to 
reinforce righteousness by hypnotic instead of by 
an appeal to spiritual energies? If we cure the 
depraved boy of his stealing habit by hypnotism, 
would it not be the simple logical consequence 
that his whole education and training ought to 
be left to such a safe and forceful influence? 
And that opens the widest perspective of social 
problems. It leads us to a new and separate ques- 
tion: What can the modern psychologist con- 
tribute to the prevention and suppression of 
crime? 

[228] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 

A few weeks ago there stumbled into my labora- 
tory a most pitiable human wreck; I saw at the 
first glance how morphine had devastated the 
frame of a man in his best years, and trembling 
and with rolling eyes he confessed that he was 
using thirty grains of the destructive poison every 
day. He could neither eat nor sleep, he had not 
worked for years, he had left wife and child, — 
it was a gruesome story of heartrending misery. 
They had sent him to asylums in vain ; he remained 
the slave of his passion, and everyone treated him 
with contempt and disgust. Slowly I drew out his 
whole tragedy from the beginning. He had been 
successful in life and hard at work; then he had 
had an accident and had been brought into a 
Southern hospital. There the surgeons gave him 
morphine every evening to secure a restful night, 
just a little " shot " of an eighth of a grain. When 
he left the hospital his hip was healed, but the 
poor fellow could not sleep without the drug, and 
[281] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
from day to day the dose had to be increased — he 
was a morphinist, an outcast, without energy and 
without hope. 

For weeks I have been fighting his passion with 
persistent suggestive treatment, and the dose he 
needs has now been reduced to the hundredth 
part, and his old strength and enjoyment of life 
have slowly come back; he will be cured soon. 
But every day when I put my full energy to the 
task, I have to think of the cruelty with which so- 
ciety has treated him. He was not born a " dope 
fiend " ; he did not choose the poison. Organised so- 
ciety injected it into his system — a small dose only, 
but enough to make the craving for it irresistible, 
and when it had grown to ruinous proportions so- 
ciety was ready to despise and to condemn him. 
Even in the best case it could only make heroic ef- 
forts to overcome the gigantic passion which it had 
recklessly raised. To me this diseased passion is a 
symbol of all the crime that fills the countries of 
the globe. No man is born a criminal. But society 
gives him without his will the ruinous injection — 
of course, a small dose only, a shot of an eighth 
of a grain, and despises him if the injected in- 
[232] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
stinct grows and grows, and when it has destroyed 
the whole man, then society goes heroically to 
work with police and court and punishment. It 
is nearly always too late — to prevent that first 
reckless injection would have been better than all 
the labour of the penitentiaries. 

At last this conviction is making its way every- 
where : prevention of crime is more important than 
treatment of crime. It is claimed that this country 
spends annually five hundred million dollars more 
on fighting the existing crime than on all its works 
of charity, education and religion; the feeling is 
at last growing that a fraction of that expense 
and energy would be ample for providing that 
such a quantity of habitual crime should not come 
to existence at all. For such a result, however, it 
is essential that all social factors cooperate in 
harmony and that no science which may contribute 
to this tremendous problem hold back. It is evi- 
dent that it is the duty of modern experimental 
psychology to give its serious attention to such 
thoughts, and a psychologist may therefore ask 
for a hearing. He has perhaps little to con- 
tribute, as only in very recent days has the psy- 
[233] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
chological laboratory come into connection with 
the world of crime, but that little is the more 
needed to awake interest for this too much neg- 
lected aspect of the case. 

Public opinion, to be sure, to-day leans toward 
calling the psychologist as witness for a very dif- 
ferent purpose. The psychologist is to disburden 
society of its responsibility for the growth of 
crime, inasmuch as he is called to testify that the 
criminal is born as such. Reminiscences of Lom- 
broso's interesting theories and of his whole school 
fill the air. It seems a dogma that the true scientist 
must accept the type of the born criminal along 
with other human abnormalities which are beyond 
our social making and unmaking, like the epileptic, 
or, on the sunny side of society, the musical genius. 
But in such a form the doctrine is certainly mis- 
leading and distorted, and the psychologist must 
refuse to furnish evidence. No one will deny the 
importance of those Italian inquiries which were 
quickly amplified by the researchers of all coun- 
tries. It was of the highest value to study the 
bodily and mental characteristics of the inmates 
of our prisons, to gather anthropological and 
[234] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
sociological data of their misshapen ears or pal- 
ates, of their tattooing and their slang, and 
finally to make psychological experiments as to 
their sensitiveness and their emotions. But no re- 
sult justifies the claim that criminals are born as 
such. The accusation against society stands after 
Lombroso firmer than before ; society has not done 
its duty. 

From the outset we must not forget that from 
a psychological point of view it is utterly vague 
to speak of a criminal disposition as if such a term 
stood for a unified mental state. In the old days 
of reckless phrenology it seemed so simple to talk 
of the sense for architecture or the sense for 
morality, and in the same way of the absence of 
such sense* as if really one elementary function 
only were involved. All that was necessary for 
the old phrenologist, because it was his belief 
that he was able to recognise the development of 
mental functions like love of music or criminality 
from the development of certain bumps on the 
skull; and for that purpose it was again neces- 
sary to presuppose that such mental traits were 
located in one single corner of the brain. 
[235] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
To-day we know that such faculties are the out- 
come of hundreds of thousands of processes which 
are going on in perhaps millions of brain parts. 
We may seek the localised seat for simple tone 
sensations or simple colour sensations, but not for 
a whole perception of a thing, and infinitely less 
for such complex states, built up from ideas, emo- 
tions, and volitions. 

How does the average man succeed in living an 
honest life? Impressions and thoughts carry to 
his mind numberless ideas which awake feelings of 
pleasure and displeasure. The pleasurable idea 
stirs up the desire and the impulse to realise it in 
action, and the disagreeable idea awakes the im- 
pulse to get rid of the displeasing source. There 
is no further will act necessary; the idea of the 
end itself presses the brain button and makes us 
act. We approach the attractive and escape the 
painful by the mere power of the ideas ; the whole 
development of life from the first sucking for 
sweet milk is possible only through this mechanism. 
But from the beginning life complicates this pro- 
cess. The tempting idea of the end to be reached 
awakes, before the action sets in, some counter 
[236] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
idea, perhaps the thought of dangerous results ; 
we desire the fruit, but we know it is poisonous, and 
the idea of poisoning works in the opposite direc- 
tion. The attractive impression gives the impulse 
to extend the arm, and the thought of danger 
gives the counter impulse to withdraw the arm. 
The one tends to inhibit the other ; the more vivid 
idea overpowers the weaker one; we do not grasp 
for the poisonous fruit, because the danger holds 
us back. 

Such counter idea, which associates itself with 
the idea of the end, may be of social character; 
the expectation of punishment or of contempt 
may work as such a check, and yet the mechan- 
ism of the process is just the same. It is again 
a balancing of opposing forces. And finally, in- 
stead of such social ideas, there may stand on 
the other side a religious habit or an ethical ideal 
which may become effective where no social fear 
is involved, but the principle remains always the 
same: the struggle of ideas controls the resulting 
action. There is no good or bad, wise or foolish 
actor behind those ideas to pick out the favoured 
one, but the ideas in their varieties of vividness 
[237] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
and feeling-tone with their attached impulses are 
themselves the working of the personality, and 
their striving determines the result. A life may be 
honest, or at least decent, if the tempting ideas of 
socially forbidden ends are inhibited and over- 
powered by opposing considerations, ideas of pun- 
ishment and harm, or of religious fear. On a 
higher level we may demand that it shall be the 
idea of moral dignity which checks the forbidden 
impulse. But the essential point remains that the 
non-criminal, the correct life, is always the result 
of a complex interplay between ideas and counter 
ideas with the result that the thought of some un- 
pleasant consequence inhibits the desire. The 
mechanism of the process is therefore not differ- 
ent from the case where the idea of bodily harm 
prevents us from doing a reckless or dangerous 
thing. And in this way the psychologist cannot 
acknowledge a special function of non-criminal 
behaviour; it overlaps and practically coincides 
with the reasonable, cautious way of living in 
every other respect. By the smallest possible 
steps every man's adjustment to his environment 
leads from the avoidance of bodily risks to the 
[238] 






THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
avoidance of social risks, and thus to non-crimi- 
nal habits. There is nowhere a sharp demarcation 
line. The one who is instinctively overmuch afraid 
of being found out in wrong-doing will live a 
faultless life from the standpoint of law; just as 
truly as his neighbour who obeys the laws from 
a moral conviction. It is impossible to bring crim- 
inality, from a psychological viewpoint, down to 
one formula. 

The normal decent life thus demands that an 
idea which by its feeling tone stimulates to a for- 
bidden action shall awake, at the same time, the 
counter ideas which stimulate to the inhibition of 
the action, and that these opposing ideas shall re- 
main victorious. It is evident that crime may thus 
result from most different reasons. Those social 
counter ideas may not have been learned, or they 
may not come quickly enough to consciousness, or 
they may be too faint, or, on the other hand, the 
original ideas with their desires may be too intense, 
or their emotions may be too vehement, or the 
mechanism of inhibition may not be working 
normally — in short, a defect or an abnormality in 
any part of the complex process may lead to a con- 
[239] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
flict with the law. And yet how different the mind 
in which the impulses are too strong from that in 
which the opposing ideas are too faint and that in 
which the inhibition does not work precisely. And 
where is to be the point at which the defect be- 
comes abnormal? The temperament with strong 
impulses may remain still quite well behaved if the 
checking ideas are unusually strong too, and the 
faint checks may be harmless if the desires are 
still weaker. 

Moreover, it is clear that none of these defects 
works in the direction of crime alone. The brain 
in which such counter ideas are too slowly asso- 
ciated has no special trouble in the line of legal 
consequence alone ; it is a general deficiency ; all 
the ideas come slowly, the mental vision is nar- 
row ; the man is stupid and mentally lazy. On the 
other hand, the brain in which the opposing ideas 
are unable to produce inhibition must do the reck- 
less thing everywhere: he runs risks and does not 
care. And the brain in which the impulses are 
overstrong will again show its emotional lack of 
balance in every field. In short, there are minds 
which are born slow or stupid or brutal or 
[240] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
excitable or lazy or quaint or reckless or 
dull — and in every one of such minds a certain 
chance for crime is given. But to be born with a 
mind which by its special stupidity or carelessness 
or vehemence gives to crime an easier foothold 
than the average mind certainly does not mean to 
be a born criminal. The world is full of badly 
balanced or badly associating persons ; we cannot 
deny that nature provided them poorly in the 
struggle for social existence; they are less fit 
than others, but their ending within prison walls 
is only one of the many dangers which life has in 
store for them ; the same unfit apparatus may make 
them unable to gain a position or to have friends 
or to protect themselves against disease. In short, 
it is not criminals that are " born," but men with 
poorly working minds. And yet who will say where 
a mind is just of the right kind? No brain works 
perfectly — what intelligence and what tempera- 
ment would be ideal? " All the world is peculiar." 
It is thus only a question of relative amount. 

Just this, indeed, is the situation which the psy- 
chologist finds. Of course, if we turn to the pro- 
fessional criminal who has become a specialist at 
[241 ] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
safe-blowing or at sneak-thieving or at check- 
forging or burglary, and who has been shaped by 
long years in the penitentiaries, we find specimens 
of mind which are very different from the normal 
average ; but those are the differences of training. 
They have become indeed almost unable to avoid 
crimes ; they have to go on in their career, but it 
was not their inborn disposition that forced them 
to burglary. If we abstract from the effect of 
such life training in the social underworld, and 
from the traces of poor education, of bad ex- 
ample, of disease and neglect, we find among the 
criminals the same types of mind as in other 
spheres, only with a great percentage of all kinds 
of mental inferiority — stupid and narrow minds, 
vehement and passionate minds, minds with weak 
power of comprehension and minds with ineffective 
power of inhibition, minds without normal emo- 
tions and minds without energy for work. 

When a school for criminal boys was carefully 
examined, it was found that of the two hundred 
boys one hundred and twenty-seven were deficient 
in their general make-up, either in the direction 
of feeble-mindedness or in the direction of hys- 
[242] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
teric emotion or in the direction of epileptic dis- 
turbance. And fuller light is thrown on these 
figures as soon as others are added; in eighty- 
five cases the father or the mother, or both, were 
drunkards ; in twenty-four cases, the parents were 
insane; in twenty-six cases, epileptics; and in 
twenty-six further cases, suffering from other 
nervous diseases. Not the criminal tendency was 
born with the poor children, but the insufficient 
capacity and resistance of the central nervous 
system; and this was their inheritance from ab- 
normal and degenerate parents. 

If we wish to express it in terms of experimental 
psychology, we may consult the careful tests which 
have been made with female criminals in Southern 
penitentiaries, on the one side, and female students 
of a large university on the other. Certainly, 
point for point the criminals show a different re- 
sult. For instance, in memory tests the average 
student remembered a series of seven letters or a 
series of eight numerals, while under the same ex- 
perimental conditions the average criminal re- 
membered only five letters or six numerals. Or 
the test for the attention to tactual impressions 
[243] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
showed that the students discriminated two com- 
pass points as two on the right fore-arm at a dis- 
tance of sixteen millimetres, while the criminals 
did not discriminate them with less than twenty- 
four millimetres. If students pulled at a hook as 
fast as they could, their energy would be decreased 
in half a minute by 1.6 pounds, while that of the 
criminals decreased by 2.4 pounds. Or if a word 
was given as starting point for any associations 
which might arise in consciousness, the average 
number of associations in one minute was for the 
students ten, for the criminals five. In short, in 
every respect the average of the criminals shows 
a poorer mental equipment than the average of 
the picked student minds. But here again no one 
feature points to a special demand for crime. 
Criminals are recruited especially from the men- 
tally inferior; that is the only true core of the 
doctrine of the born criminal. But the mental 
inferiority — intellectual or emotional or voli- 
tional — forces no one to steal and burglarise. 
He cannot and will never equal the clever, well- 
balanced, energetic fellow, but society may find 
a modest place, humble but safe, even for the 
[244] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
most stupid and most indifferent and most un- 
energetic : no one is predestined by his brain to the 
penitentiary. 

It may be replied, of course, that there are 
plenty of cases in which crime is committed from 
an irresistible impulse or from a total lack of 
inhibition or from other defects which exclude 
free self-determination. But in such cases we have 
clearly no longer any right to speak of crime; it 
is insanity. The man who starts incendiary fires 
because he has hallucinations in which he hears 
God's voice ordering him to burn the town, is not 
a criminal. Moreover, the pathological impulses 
of the diseased mind are again not confined to the 
criminal sphere ; again crime is only the chance ef- 
fect; the disturbance is general. The irresistible 
impulse may be just as well directed against the 
man's own personality, and may lead to self -muti- 
lation or to suicide. And that holds true also for 
the milder degrees. Only to-day I studied the case 
of a lad of eleven who was brought to me because 
he was found stealing from time to time. He was 
a dear little boy, surrounded with comfort and the 
best and most loving influences. He fights 
[245] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
and fights against his impulse and speaks of it 
frankly. Sometimes it comes like an attack; he 
longs for some money perhaps to buy fire-crackers 
with, and he simply cannot resist till it is done, 
he told me with tears, and then he hardly knows 
why he did it. But it was evident at the first glance 
that the boy was not normally built, and that the 
attacks which led to such pseudo-crimes were 
pathological, quite similar to epileptic or hysteric 
fits. To prevent such explosions of the diseased 
brain is not prevention of crime; but, on the one 
side, treatment of disease, on the other side, pro- 
tection of society against the outbreaks of dan- 
gerous patients. In real crime we have to presup- 
pose that the checking of the impulse by the 
counter idea would have been possible if the avail- 
able energy had been brought into play. Crime 
is thus not a disease, and there is no need to excuse 
the existence of our jails by considering them as 
asylums. Every action is, of course, the necessary 
result of foregoing causes, but such effect of the 
causes remains a free, and therefore a responsible 
action, as long as the causes work on a mechanism 
which is able to secure an unhampered interplay 
[246] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
of influences. The insane or the hypnotised mind 
has no freedom and therefore cannot commit crime, 
but the merely stupid or reckless or brutal or in- 
different minds are still free, while it is clear that 
the probability of a disastrous result is for them 
alarmingly high. 

If we thus exclude the pathological mind from 
further discussion, we can say that no one is born 
a criminal: what, then, has society to do that no 
one shall become a criminal? The latest of all sci- 
ences, eugenics, might look backwards and demand 
that society take care that such mentally weak 
and inferior persons are not born at all. Vital sta- 
tistics show indeed on some of their darkest pages 
that the overwhelming majority of those degen- 
erate personalities have drunkards and epileptics 
as parents. But our immediate lack is a different 
one : we presuppose that the minds of the millions 
in all their variations of strong and weak, of in- 
telligence and emotionality and power are born 
and sent into the streets of the cities; what can 
the psychologist advise that their way may not 
lead them from the street to the cell of the prison ? 

But now the problem has become simplified. We 
[247] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
know the mechanism which keeps men straight ; we 
can foresee, therefore, what influences must be 
detrimental. If the counter idea is to balance and 
to overcome the first desire, we can foresee that 
the chances for crime must grow if the impulses 
are strengthened or if the counter ideas are weak- 
ened or eliminated, or if the inhibitory apparatus 
is damaged, or if in any other way the sound bal- 
ance is tampered with. Here is indeed the place 
for the experiment of the psychologist. He can 
isolate the special factors and study their influence 
under the exact conditions of the laboratory. We 
may take illustrations at random. 

We said that crime involves an impulse to action 
which is normally to be checked. The checking 
will be the more difficult the stronger the impulse. 
The psychologist therefore asks: What influences 
have the power to reinforce the impulse? Has, for 
instance, imitation such an influence? Mere specu- 
lation cannot answer such a question, and even so- 
called practical experience may lead to very mis- 
taken conclusions. But the laboratory experiment 
can tell the story in distinct figures. I ask my sub- 
jects, for instance, to make rhythmical finger 
[248] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
movements by which a weight is lifted, and the ap- 
paratus in which the arm rests records exactly the 
amount of every contraction. After a while the 
energy seems exhausted; my idea has no longer 
the power to lift the weight more than a few milli- 
metres ; the recorded curve sinks nearly to zero. 
I try with encouraging words or with harsh com- 
mand; the motor energies of these word-stimuli 
are not ineffective; the curve shows a slight up- 
ward movement, but again it sinks rapidly. And 
then I make the same rhythmical movement myself 
before the eyes of my subject; he sees it and at 
once the curve ascends with unexpected strength. 
The movements have now simply to imitate the 
watched ones, and this consciousness of imitation 
has reinforced the energy of the impulse beyond 
any point which his own will could have reached. 
It is as if the imitation of the suggestive sight 
suddenly brings to work all the stored-up powers. 
The psychologist can vary the experiment in a 
hundred forms; always the same result, that the 
impressive demonstration of an action gives to 
the impulse of the imitating mind the maximum 
of force — it must then be the one condition under 
[249] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 

which it is most difficult to inhibit the impulse. 
How many helpful suggestions for the good, for 
education and training and self -development can 
be drawn from such facts ; but, much more, how 
many warnings against the reckless fostering of 
criminality ! In millions of copies the vulgar news- 
paper pictures of crime reach the homes of the 
suggestible masses and every impulse towards the 
forbidden is dangerously reinforced. Every bru- 
tality spreads outward and accentuates the lawless 
impulses in the surrounding ; the abolition of prize 
fights and whipping posts is not enough. 

To point in another direction: everything must 
be fatal for weak honesty which reduces the power 
of restraint. The psychological experiment can 
here analyse the influences, for instance, of our 
usual stimulants — coffee and tea, tobacco and alco- 
hol, drugs and nervina. Laboratory experiment 
indicates perhaps only slight variations in the 
rapidity of movements in the memory tests or 
in the discriminations of stimuli, but every one of 
those changes must be endlessly magnified if it is 
projected into the dimensions of a world-city in 
which the millions indulge in artificial excitement 
[250] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
and stimulation. Take the well-studied case of al- 
cohol. We ask, let us say, a number of normal men 
to go through a series of experiments in their 
ordinary state. 

We may begin with a reaction time ex- 
periment. That means we study how long it 
takes to make the quickest possible hand-move- 
ment in response to a flash-light or to a click ; we 
measure the time between the light or sound stim- 
ulus and the reaction in thousandths of a second. 
Then we vary it by a test where various movements 
are to be made in response to different lights, so 
that a choice and discrimination is involved. We 
then turn, perhaps, to memory experiments — with 
the learning of letters or figures or words. Next 
may be an experiment in intellectual activity; we 
measure the time of simple arithmetical opera- 
tions. Then we study the mental associations ; for 
instance, we give a list of two hundred words and 
our subject has to speak for each one the first 
word which flashes on his mind. We may then 
study the character of these closely-bound ideas 
and may group them statistically. Then we meas- 
ure with a dynamometer the strength of the great- 
[251] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
est possible effort for action. Next in order per- 
haps we study the judgment of our subject in his 
estimation of space and time distances, then the 
accuracy with which he imitates a given rhythm, 
then the rapidity with which he counts the letters 
of a page, then the sharpness of attention with 
which he discriminates a set of short impressions, 
and so on through other tests for other mental 
functions. For every test we get his average fig- 
ures. And then we begin the examination of the ef- 
fect of the stimulants. How are all these exactly 
measurable functions changed twenty minutes or 
an hour or two hours after taking a dose of one 
ounce or two ounces or three ounces of pure alco- 
hol, whiskey, beer or champagne? 

Only such a variety of tests gives the possibility 
of disengaging the effect and of understanding 
where the real disturbance sets in. Certain func- 
tions seem certainly improved. For instance, we 
soon find that the reaction time test gives smaller 
figures under alcohol, at least in a first stage ; the 
subject who needs normally, say 150 thousandths 
of a second to press a telegraph key after hear- 
ing a click, may need only 125 thousandths of. a 
[252] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
second half an hour after his alcohol dose. But is 
that really an improvement? The same records 
show that while the time of the reaction decreases 
there appear at the same time wrong reactions 
which did not occur in his normal state ; again and 
again, the key is pressed before the signal is really 
heard, the impulse explodes when any chance 
touches it off instead of remaining under the con- 
trol of consciousness which waits for the click. 

In the same way, it seems in the first short 
period from the dynamometric tests that the alco- 
hol brings an improvement of motor energy, but 
half an hour later the tables are turned, the mus- 
cular effectiveness is decreased. In the field of as- 
sociations the time of bringing a new idea to 
consciousness becomes longer, the process is re- 
tarded, but, more important, the associative pro- 
cess becomes more mechanical. If we call those 
associations external in which an idea awakes an- 
other with which it is connected in space or time, 
and internal those which involve a thorough rela- 
tion, a connection by meaning and purpose, we 
can say that the external associations strongly 
increase with alcohol and the internal ones be- 
[253] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
come eliminated. Still greater are the changes 
in mechanical memorising, which is at first 
greatly facilitated and in calculation, which suf- 
fers from the first. The strongest improvement 
is shown in reading, the greatest difficulty in the 
intellectual connection. And if the various threads 
are connected by careful study, we get a unified 
result: all motor reactions have become easier, all 
acts of apperception worse, the whole ideational 
interplay has suffered, the inhibitions are reduced, 
the merely mechanical superficial connections con- 
trol the mind, and the intellectual processes are 
slow. Is it necessary to demonstrate that every 
one of these changes favours crime? The counter 
ideas awake too slowly, hasty action results from 
the first impulse before it can be checked, the in- 
hibition of the forbidden deed becomes ineffective, 
the desire for rash vehement movements becomes 
overwhelming. In such a way experimental psy- 
chology can carry the vague impressions of the 
bystander into a field of exact studies where mere 
prejudices are not allowed to interfere, but where 
real objections can be substantiated. Moreover, 
the general statements can be particularised by 
[254] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
subtler examinations still: how does alcohol work 
in different climates, at different seasons, at dif- 
ferent hours of the day, in work and in fatigue, 
in different states of health, with food and with- 
out, for different ages, different sexes, different 
races, and how is the effect of pure alcohol related 
to that of the various beverages, to whiskey and 
beer and wine? Only if we can differentiate the 
mental influences through such experimental tests 
can we secure a rational protection against one of 
the most persistent sources of social evils. 

With the same methods we might study tobacco 
and coffee and tea, bromides and morphine, but 
also the effects of physical or mental overstrain, of 
bad air and bad light, of irrational nourishment 
and insufficient sleep, of exhaustive sports and 
emotional exertions, and a hundred other factors 
which enter into the daily life of the masses. On 
such an experimental basis only can we hope for 
regulation and improvement; a sweeping pro- 
scription, of course, might be reached without 
laboratory studies : simply to forbid everything is 
easy, but such radicalism is practically impossible 
as far as the evidence of fatigue or poverty is con- 
[255] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
cerned, and perhaps possible but unwise as far 
as the stimulants are in question. The psycholog- 
ical experiment must show the middle way which 
shall close the fountains of evil and yet keep open 
the sources of good. 

Mere abstinence from stimulants, indeed, is no 
real solution of the problem ; it is just the psychol- 
ogist who knows too well the evil effects of monot- 
ony and emptiness ; who understands that the crav- 
ing for stimulants and artificial excitement be- 
longs to the deepest conditions of our physical 
existence, and that the complete suppression of it 
leads to mental explosions which bring man again 
to disastrous impulses and crime. The laboratory 
experiment can demonstrate in turn how the psy- 
chological conditions are changed when such a 
dreary state of waiting and monotony lays hold 
on the mind; how certain mental functions are 
starving and others dangerously overwrought. A 
state of dulness and expectant attention is created 
in which the longing for contrast may intensify 
the desires to a point where the reaction is more 
vehement than under any stimulant. That is the 
state which, projected into the masses, may lead 
[256] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
to gambling and perversity, and on to irrational 
crimes, which through the mere excitement of the 
imagination overcome the emptiness of an unstim- 
ulated life. 

Or the experiment may undertake to ex- 
amine the subtler mechanism of mental inhibition : 
how far does the suppression and inhibition of the 
motor impulse depend on the intensity of the 
counter stimulus and how far on habit — that is, on 
unbroken repetition? How is it altered by inter- 
ruption of training or by the feeling-tone of the 
ideas? Simple measurement of reaction times may 
be again the method, varied by the introduction of 
warning signals which are to counterbalance the 
stimulus. Yet the short schematic experiments of 
the psychologist's workshop illustrate clearly how 
and why a public state of lawless corruption and 
general disrespect of law must undermine the in- 
hibitory effects of the law and thus bring crime to 
a rich harvest. That is just the wonderful power 
of the psychological experiment, that it can ana- 
lyse the largest social movements in the smallest 
and most schematic miniature copies of the mental 
forces involved, and from the subtle analysis is 
[257] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
only one step to the elimination of dangers. What 
the commercialism of our time or the vices of the 
street, the recklessness of the masses and the vul- 
garity of the newspapers, the frivolity of the 
stage and the excitement of the gambling hells 
may mean for the weak individual cannot be better 
understood than through the microscopical model 
of it in the experimental test which allows subtle 
variations. 

The psychologist will thus certainly not believe 
that all or most is done for the prevention of 
crime by mere threatening with punishment. The 
question, in this connection, is not whether the pun- 
ishment satisfies our demand for retaliation or 
whether the punishment helps indirectly towards 
prevention by educating and reforming the man 
behind whom the doors of the penitentiary are 
closed. The question is now only whether the fear 
of a future judicial punishment will be a sufficient 
counter idea to check the criminal impulse. The 
psychologist cannot forget that too many condi- 
tions must frustrate such expectations. The hope 
of escaping justice in the concrete case will easily 
have a stronger feeling tone than the opposing 
[258] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
fear of the abstract general law. The strength of 
the forbidden desire will narrow the circle of asso- 
ciations and eliminate the idea of the probable 
consequences. The stupid mind will not link the 
correct expectations, the slow mind will bring the 
check too late when the deed is done, the vehement 
mind will overrule the energies of inhibition, the 
emotional mind will be more moved by the antici- 
pated immediate pleasure than by the thought of a 
later suffering. And all this will be reinforced if 
overstrain has destroyed the nervous balance or if 
stimulants have smoothed the path of motor dis- 
charge. If the severity of cruel punishments has 
brutalised the mind, the threat will be as ineffective 
as if the mildness of the punishment had reduced 
its pain. And, worst of all, this fear will be ruled 
out if the mind develops in an atmosphere of crime 
where the child hears of the criminal as hero and 
looks at jail as an ordinary affair, troublesome 
only as most factors in his slum life are trouble- 
some; or if the anarchy of corruption or class 
justice, of reckless legislation or public indiffer- 
ence to law defeats the inhibiting counter idea of 
punishment and deprives it of its emotional 
[259] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
strength. The system of punishment will be the 
more disappointing the more mechanical it is in 
its application. The plan of probation thus means 
a real progress. 

More important than the motives of fear are 
the influences which can shape the minds of the 
tempted, the influences which reduce the emotional 
and motor powers of forbidden desires, awake 
regularly and strongly the social counter ideas, 
strengthen their inhibiting influence, and weaken 
thus the primary impulse. It must be said again: 
criminals are not born, but made — not even self- 
made, but fellow-made. Society must work nega- 
tively to remove those influences which work in the 
opposite direction. The atmosphere of criminality, 
the vulgarity and brutality, the meanness and friv- 
olity of the surroundings must be removed from 
the mind in its development. And if the social 
contrasts are necessary for much of the good, at 
least the vulgar esteem of mere riches and the 
pitiless contempt for misery can be eliminated. 
Above all, a well-behaved mind grows only in a 
well-treated body; true, far-seeing hygiene can 
prevent more crime than any law. But it is not 
[260] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
only a question of the favourite work of our 
hygienists, the infectious and germ diseases, to- 
gether with the sanitary conditions of factories 
and tenements. Hygiene has to take no less care 
of the overworked or wrongly treated senses and 
nerve systems from the schoolroom to the stock 
exchange; there is no gain if we avoid typhoid 
epidemics but fall into epidemics of insanity. The 
whole rhythm of life breaks down the instruments 
of nervous resistance, and the most immediate 
symptom is necessarily the growth of crime. It 
is not the impulse itself, but the inability to resist 
the impulse that is the real criminal feature. The 
banker who speculates with the funds of his bank 
is not a criminal because such an idea arises in 
his consciousness, but because his idea is not in- 
hibited by the counter ideas, and yet the whole 
community has pushed to break down the bar- 
riers which his mind could have put into the 
motor path of the ruinous impulse. 

Of course, the negative precautions must be 

supplemented by the positive ones. Hygiene has 

not only to destroy the unclean, but to build up 

the clean. And for mental hygiene this holds 

[261] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
still more strongly. To create a public life which 
is an example and an inspiration to the humblest, 
which fills with civic pride the lowest, — means 
to abolish the penitentiaries. The public welfare 
must give to everybody through work, through 
politics, through education, through art, through 
religion, a kind of life interest and life content 
in which envy is meaningless. It is from this realm 
that the counter ideas must be reinforced that 
automatically check the impulse to the immoral 
deed. But no public scheme can make superfluous 
those clearest sources of pure life, the motives of 
private personal interest between human being and 
human being. Everything which strengthens fam- 
ily life and works against its dissolution, every- 
thing which gives the touch of personal sympathy 
to the forlorn, helps towards the prevention of 
crime. How often can a criminal life be funda- 
mentally changed as soon as the absurd prejudice 
is given up that every criminal is a different kind 
of man from those outside of jail, and straight- 
forward sympathy instead of mere charitable pity 
is offered. To make them feel that they are recog- 
nised as equals means to win them over to decency. 
[262] 



THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
And those who analyse them psychologically know 
well that there is really no condescension necessary 
for such acknowledgment. They are the equals 
of the unpunished; they are stupid or lazy or 
vehement or reckless or uneducated or unemotional 
or egotistic, but all that we find on this side of the 
legal demarcation line as well. We are accustomed 
to bow to the stupid and lazy and reckless and 
egotistic, in case that life has brought them 
under conditions where a sufficient balance was 
secured; they are not different in their inmost 
selves, even if surroundings, bad example, over- 
whelming temptation, the saloon, the cruelty of 
misfortune has once in a hasty hour destroyed that 
balance. 

There lies finally the deep importance of a full 
confession. The man who confesses puts himself 
again on an equal ground with the honest major- 
ity; he belongs again to those who want both 
health and justice; he gives up his identity with 
the criminal and eliminates the crime like a foreign 
body from his life. A true confession wins the 
bedrock of life again and is the safest prevention 
of further crime. The psychologist — I say it with 
[263] 



ON THE WITNESS STAND 
hesitation, as my observations on that point may 
not yet be complete enough, and the subject is an 
entirely new one — may even be able to find out by 
his experiments whether a true confession is prob- 
able or not. After all, the actions of every man 
strive for satisfaction, and there cannot be satis- 
faction without unity. He who lives in the present 
only gains such satisfaction from the immediate 
experience; the pleasure and enjoyment of the 
present hour is the end of his consciousness and 
absorbs him so fully that complete unity of mind 
is reached. Another type rushes forward, the mind 
directed toward the future; the suffering of the 
hour is overborne by the hope of the coming 
success, and present and future complete for him 
the unity of life. Both those who turn to the 
present and to the future cannot have a desire for 
true liberating confession. But it is different with 
those who have a vivid memory and whose mind is 
thus ever turning back to the past. There is the 
unending conflict between their memories which 
belong to the life of purity, to childhood and 
parents' love, to religion and friendship, and the 
present sorrow and anxiety ; the craving for unity 
[264] 






THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
must end this struggle; a confession connects the 
present with the past again and throws out the 
interfering intrusion of shame. If the experiment 
of the psychologist demonstrates the possession 
of a vivid living memory, the chances are strong 
that a confession is to be trusted. The criminal 
deed is thus almost a split-off consciousness, a 
part of a dissociated personality, and through 
the confession it is cut off absolutely. On the other 
hand, if it is too late, if the split-off part has 
grown to be the stronger and has finally become 
the real self, then it is nearly always too late 
for prevention by social hygiene; the criminal 
who has become a professional is nearly always 
lost, and society has only to consider how to pro- 
tect itself against the damage he is effecting. He 
must be separated from the commonwealth just as 
the insane must be removed from the market places 
of life. Short punishment for the professional 
criminal is useless and harmful in every respect. 
But his career is a terrible warning against delay- 
ing the prevention of crime till society — rashly 
ignoring psychology — has itself manufactured 
the hopeless criminal. 

[265] 



INDEX 



Abstinence, 256 
Advertisement, 34 
Alcohol, 251 
Alienist, 46, 139 
Amnesia, 68 
Anaesthesia, 108 
Applied psychology, 9 
Association, 76, 83, 103, 
251, 253 



Depersonalization, 217 
Detection of crime, 73 
Direction of sound, 32 
Disposition, 235 
Dissociation, 147, 165 
Dream, 59, 156 
Dynamometer, 251 

Education, 8, 105 



88, 243. 

Born criminal, 234, 241 
Business, 10 



Attention, 7, 30, 48, 56, 64, Emotion, 86, 99,106, 113,191 

Eugenics, 247 
Evidence, 19, 44, 65, 85, 

109, 140, 145, 186 
Excitement, 124, 127, 130, 

158 
Experimental psychology, 4, 

6, 45, 65, 79, 109, 118, 

184, 233, 243, 248 
Expert, 20, 46, 108, 117, 197 
Expression, 118 



Certainty, 49, 55, 179 
Colour discrimination, 32 
Confession, 73, 98, 105, 137 

143, 165, 206, 263 
Court, 45, 108, 194, 207 

Cross-examination, 50, 183 ]£ye movements 125 
Cruelty, 73 

Feeble mindedness, 242 
Decisions, 19 Feeling, 7, 113, 121 

Deformation, 93 Frequency, 65 

[ 267 ] 



IND 

Hygiene, 261 

Hypnotism, 167, 175, 190, 

203. 251 
Hysteria, 106, 150 

Identification, 63 
Illusions, 15, 122, 148 
Imagination. 60 
Imitation, 248 
Impressiveness. 65 
Individual differences, 63, 

210 
Inhibition, 30, 64. 106, 192, 

219, 237. 245, 257 
Innocence, 74, 82, 132, 139 
Insanity, 245 

Jury. 11, 45, 75, 186, 194. 
198 

Lie, IS, 77 

Magnetism. 213 
Medium, 30 
Melancholia, 149 
Memory, 7, 18, 39, 44, 54. 

61. 155. 180, 208. 243 
Mental diseases. 152 
Morphinism, 231 
Movements, 120 

[ 26* 



£X 

Multimurderer, 92 
Mysticism, 58 

Neurasthenic. 153, 227 
Number, 15, 21 

Oath, 39. 43, 47, 55 
Observation. 23, 50 
Omissions, 52 

Perception. 18, 196 
Perjury, 225 

Personal equation, 5, 196 
Personality, 161, 219, 238 
Phrenology, 235 
Physician. 9 
Physiology, 5 
Pleasure, 121, 127 
Plethysmography 129 
Pneumograph, 126 
Prevention. 226. 231 
Professional criminal, 241, 

^65 
Psychological laboratories, 

3. 46, 76. 79. 183. 248 
Punishment. 238, 258 



Reaction time, 252 
Recencv, 65 

► ] 






IN 

Recollection, 48, 67, 197 
Reliability, 46 
Remembrance, 58 
Respiration, 127 
Retardation, 86, 97 

Second personality, 147, 161 
Self accusation, 148 
Self consciousness, 161 
Sex, 54 

Simulation, 113 
Size estimation, 27 
Speed estimation, 23 
Sphygmograph, 128 
Suggestibility, 190, 193, 197 
Suggestion, 26, 31, 42, 57, 
147, 165, 175, 187, 222 



DEX 

Suppressed ideas, 83, 97, 

106 
Suspected, 82, 115, 145 

Taste, 33 

Telepathy, 3, 212 

Third degree, 74, 105, 115 

Threats, 73 

Time estimation, 15, 22, 53 

Time measurement, 80, 251 

Types of memory, 61 

Veracity, 44, 94 
Vividness, 55 

Witchcraft, 145 



THE END 



[ 269 ] 



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